I've seen some people take some pretty good pictures with an iPhone or iPad. How do you get nice results with, say, an iPhone 5s? My guess is that a few bucks spent on a tripod, upgraded camera app, and maybe a macro lens would get you to some nice, gradeable, web-quality images. Am I right? Feel free to post your iPhone/iPad/Android device photos, too. Calling @SuperDave @robec @jtlee321 @rmpsrpms @orifdoc @TIF
Telling you how to do it is simple, and will only take this one post. The devil is in the details. You need to determine the best (usually but not always the closest) possible distance for good imagery which is also large enough for posting. With some cameras, this means getting too close to the coin for lighting to be easy; with iPhones I know from learning through the experience of others that 6-10" is in the ballpark and lighting won't be too awfully difficult. You need a good stable platform with the camera, best done looking straight down, and a good square orientation to the coin. You can get as engineering-intensive as you want for this, but I know guys who do just fine laying the phone on a stack of books. The camera being at the edge of the phone helps a lot; you can peek the lens over the edge and have a nice stable rest. To ensure coin and lens are square to each other, just point the phone at a small mirror where the coin will sit. When you see the lens in the exact center of the frame, you're square to the surface. You need to bring enough light to bear to allow the phone to do its' best. It'll still take "bright enough" shots with insufficient lighting, but it'll be compromising from "optimal" by raising ISO and slowing exposures, and image quality will suffer. The usual "two lights at 10 and 2" advice for shooting coins applies just as firmly here as with any other camera. And is just as variable under differing conditions. You need to trigger the shutter remotely. I'd generally offer a timed shutter release as a solution, but with a phone even tapping the "shutter" icon might upset its' alignment to the coin. There are a few ways to do this - I can say "Cheese" to my G3 and it'll shoot the pic - but I've never owned an iPhone so I don't know the specific ways to do so. I'm told the Volume Up button on a pair of wired earbuds will do this, for instance. I'm deliberately being a bit vague here, because the one most important task for you here is experimentation. You're going to need to shoot a bunch of images to figure what works best for your iPhone, and I'd advise doing that with something not blindingly lustrous (maybe a nice circulated coin) because luster introduces a separate set of problems all its' own. Wait until you can make the camera do well-lit, sharp images of a non-lustrous coin before expanding that particular horizon. Olloclip lenses work very, very nicely with iPhones. Wait until you have the phone itself shooting well - you can and should be able to take gradable full-face coin images with just the iPhone - before going that way as well. One step at a time. Learn how to photograph before learning how to photograph with exotic equipment. It would be useful to learn about ISO, Aperture and Exposure while you're at it. Start here, under "Photo Essentials:" http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/
