You Ancient collectors are Inspiring

The September 6 thread "Let's see your lions" had beautiful, tiny coins and excellent photography.

It inspired me to buy some tiny coins (including a tiny Miletos lion coin from Valentinian), build a camera stand using a design by Doug Smith, reactivate an old DSLR, and start taking pictures of tiny coins, hoping someday to take images resembling those posted by Doug Smith and TIF. The camera stand has slots for mounting a large magnifying lens to look at coins in hand.

So far, the pictures of the tiny coins are terrible, but the pictures of bigger coins are getting better. Thanks for the inspiration!

Larger coin in third picture was ID'd by the dealer as Sicily, Himera, AE Hemilitron. Head of nymph Himera wearing sphendone: six pellets within laurel wreath. Seaby 1110. 420-408 BCE. 17 mm.

 

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Tiny ancient Greek coins are highly addictive. I call them Greek fractional coins, though the term fractional is probably a bad habbit from being a former US collector. Still, whatever you call them, fractional Greek coins are a lot of fun to own.

 

That's not a bad start. I think the problem is the lighting. Consider adding a light on the side striking the coin surface at a low angle to bring out the detail. Then play around with the brightness a little when you process the photos.

I'm sure Doug also has some good advice to offer.

 

I agree, good start. I suspect you were using automatic exposure but the small coins and large black area caused the coins to be too light. Try manual exposure and shoot a series of exposures until you get one that looks right. In photo circles there is a practice called 'Chimping' where you shoot a photo and then review it on the screen before shooting another. This is frowned upon for most photos but works well for coins. The coin is stationary. The lights are fixed. Shoot, review, adjust, repeat. Some cameras allow a live view before you shoot that will show the brightness accurately without taking a photo but there is nothing lost in shooting and throwing away several attempts. It is not like it was when film cost money.

If you are going to shoot tiny coins, you need a smaller support than that CDR spindle. I have a series of sizes made from various items. My most used now (second from left) is a cheap ball point pen tube that had a soft grip which I pulled up over he normal place giving a soft coin support. These various sizes fit over a steel rod (third from left)set into my wooden base as needed. I even have one that is hollow for shooting Chinese cash so you can see no background in the hole. Three are shown here on a rack used to hold the ones not in use at the moment.


In any kind of photography, you need to shoot a lot of bad photos to learn how to make a higher percentage of good ones. The makers of phones and cheap cameras count on you having low standards and believing their auto settings are all you need. That old Canon Digital Rebel is capable of good photos. I used one for a long time after I bought my better Canon for other photos. Later I decided I was being lazy and should shoot coins with my best camera even though the old one was quite sufficient for 99% of uses.

 

Definitely a good start, @S. Porter! As Doug said, try manual mode and do some sequences using stepwise adjustments of shutter speed and other tweaks. Play with light position and intensity. Don't forget to white balance .

 

I went to Home Depot and bought a series of wooden dowels of different diameters.

I usually shoot outdoors in direct sunlight, which creates a whole series of problems, some (but not all) of which I've been able to overcome through trial and error. One handy trick I use is to put a small piece of modeling clay on the end of the dowel and then place the coin on the clay. This allows me to adjust the angle of the coin relative to the light to get the most flattering angle. I was told to avoid using clay that contains any sulfur when doing this, which I'm sure is good advice, but apparently most modeling clay doesn't contain sulfur anyway, so this hasn't been an issue for me.

 

it just amazes me how coin collectors also become inspirational in not only our hobby of collecting, but also innovators in micro photography too..

 

To misquote a t-shirt that I saw at the Antique Car Museum in Fairbanks, AK, "It's too bad that all the people who really know how to run this country spend all their time collecting ancient coins."

 

Nice bronzes & welcome to ancients.

It's one of the most fun hobbies I have & that is many.

 

Having grown up in Anchorage, AK, I am not surprised that the most profound observation ever made in Fairbanks was on a t-shirt.

 

Thank you very much for this information. Having spent an hour rereading the wonderful photography pages on the website linked at the end of your posts, I will make smaller supports and higher side screening, and start practicing with various lighting and exposures.

 

Thanks! Is the "reflection of the coin at the bottom of the image" technique a proprietary secret, or something widely known? It is very dramatic.

 

The tiny coins occasionally fall off the CD spindle, so I have a black cloth in the bottom of the bowl to catch them gently. I might try a very small cork on top of the spindle, then the dowels or rods. And clay after getting the supports figured out. Thanks!

 

You guys are certainly more advanced than I am at taking photos. I need to learn more, right now I'm using a google phone to take my pics.

 

Thanks . I copied it from someone who copied it from someone . We each made our templates from scratch. You're welcome to copy the style too. There are many ways to do it although none are particularly simple unless you are very familiar with these programs in which you work with layers.

I made mine in Photoshop Elements. If you don't have that or regular Photoshop, a free online program which is almost identical to Photoshop Elements is Pixlr.

It certainly adds time to edit a picture into the template but once you have built the template, and once you have worked out how to remove all of the background for your coin images (probably the most time-consuming step), dropping them into the template only takes a few minutes.

If you want to try to make such a template and want to get some idea of what the layers look like, I'll send you a screen shot by PM.

A recent variation on this style is the "coins hovering over water" style created by @Curtisimo. It is fabulous. If you haven't noticed it before, here are some examples.

I do the same thing but with silicone putty-- the type used for exercising your hands (Theraputty or similar). Those putties have various viscosities. Use the stiffest one you can get. It is also helpful for removing teensy bits of lint that are often not noticed until you are editing the photo (grr!).

I used to use a DSLR but I never got good with it and the humidity ruined some camera bodies and lenses. Now I use a Canon Powershot G16 and am more careful about storing it with desiccant.

There is putty under the coin in this picture. Being able to tilt the coin is helpful when using a puny camera with which you have to get rather close to the coin. There isn't much room to position the light so moving the coin instead is helpful. In the setup below, the clamps were cheap items purchased on Amazon and the wood was scrap left over from various projects, although I had to buy a length of the larger dowel.

 

Some people are really talented at photography, others are mediocre but try hard, and then there's me.... I just use seller photos for my coins. I know I suck at photography and I don't have the right equipment to do my coins justice, so I accept that fact and let others do the hard work of photography.

 

High color rendering index (CRI) lights make a difference in showing accurate color.

John

 

Uhm, supposing I wanted to give coin photography another go, where do I get something like this?

 

The copy stand? I made it after seeing the ridiculous prices for ready-made models.

Here's the clamp, ~$12.00
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00E5M39AW/

Home Depot and other hardware stores have wood dowels and a sawing station if you want to cut it to length by hand at the store. You can probably pick up a scrap piece of 3/4" plywood for the base and coin platform while you're there. Buy some matte black spray paint too.

I joined the dowels to the wood by drilling partial depth holes in the plywood but if you don't have the appropriate drill bits you could just run a lag screw from the bottom of the platform (be sure to recess the screw head).

Mine is getting a bit beat up from frequent use and it needs to be repainted. Too bad I can't cover the dowel and platform in Vantablack!

 

Sounds like a fun weekend project. Judging by my previous skills level with woodworking, I'll make sure to check with my life insurance and health insurance providers to make sure everything is in order, and have a first aid kit and 911 on speed dial.

I can cook, I can lawyer, and I can even garden a little, but power tools and sharp objects have always been a challenge for me. I still have a scar on the bottom of my foot from where I impailed it on a nail two years ago when I tried to build a play area for my son. I also have a crooked nail from where I nearly destroyed my finger with a hammer 4 years ago while trying to fix a loose board by the side of the roof.

I'll do it, I'll see about building myself a photography stand in the next month, but if you don't hear from me for a month, it's probably because I'm recovering from nailing my hand to the board, or supergluing my forehead to the table, or I burned down the house somehow while trying to drill a hole on the board, etc.