Kaleun96

Wow what a collection! I think it looks well organised and while it might be considered "crowded" if it were in a museum, you also don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on cabinets and display cases and take over an entire room, so you've struck a good balance.

Have you considered installing some LED light strips or similar for inside the cabinets?

1 hour ago, AncientJoe said:

 

That is a remarkably clean image straight out of the camera! That would save me a tremendous amount of laborious cropping effort. Thanks for the tip!

 

No worries! I was surprised myself when I could one-click with the Magic Wand tool and have a near perfect background selection. With previous setups, I would have had to have done some manual tweaking in a few areas on the edge to help Photoshop's selection stick to the coin edge and then probably do some more cleaning up after where the selection is a bit too jagged.

I just pulled the unedited image in to Photoshop again to show how few steps it now takes me. I clicked the magic wand tool in the white area and you can see it has created a selection between the coin's edge and the edge of the diffuser on the outside:

Here's a closer look, the selection is sticking pretty close to the coin edge, so much so it's even hard to make out the "marching ants" of the selection outline (except where it has selected the edge of the diffuser). The very edge of the coin has some tiny pixel-size artefacts and transparency so I just expand the selection by a few pixels to remove those.

This is how it looks after deleting the selected background and applying a quick "inner shadow" effect around the coin's edge to help transition it into the background a bit. For a white background I use the "drop shadow" instead. The grey-ish parts of the diffuser in the background are then trivial to remove.

Here's a middle bronze age spearhead I picked up from DNW last year. It was sold under the typical "Luristan bronze" attribution but after a lot of research into spearheads I can confidently place it in Northern Iran circa 2300-1800 B.C., possibly from Tepe Hissar. A few things helped identify it, primarily the tang and "shoulder". The angled tang with a "button" end is common from across the Near East at this time (and later) but combined with this blade profile and the round "shoulder" above the tang, you only find a couple of examples that come close to looking the same from two or three settlements in the North Iran.

I cleaned off a bit of the sediment myself and coated in Paraloid B72 and then more recently designed and 3D printed the stand it now sits in.

There have been rumours about a very cool new lens coming to the market for Sony/Nikon/Fuji/etc cameras that has some use for us coin collectors. It's called the AstrHori 85mm f/2.8 TS-E Macro and it is a tilt lens. Some of you may be familiar with tilt-shift lenses that produce the "miniature effect" that makes everything look like a small scale model.

A tilt lens does not have the "shift" capability, so what does it do and how is it useful for us? So let's say you're standing across the road from a building, facing it straight-on, and you focus your camera on the front of the building. The whole front of the building is in focus because it is along the same plane, i.e. perpendicular to the lens. If you then moved to the end of the street and again focussed on the front of the building, you're now viewing the building an angle and only a small part of the building will be in focus.

source: https://snapshot.canon-asia.com/vn/article/eng/what-you-didnt-know-about-the-tilt-function-on-tilt-shift-lenses

A tilt lens helps us with this second perspective. In the diagram below, we are standing at an angle to the face of the building but we want the whole face to be in-focus, not just the parts that are perpendicular to the lens. The "tilt" in the lens allows us to shift that plane of focus so instead of the plane being perpendicular to the lens, the plane is now at an angle running the length of the building face.

source: https://snapshot.canon-asia.com/vn/article/eng/what-you-didnt-know-about-the-tilt-function-on-tilt-shift-lenses

Ok so now to get to the part about how this is useful for us photographing coins. Many of you may notice when photographing or holding your coins that they often look better at a slight angle, where they catch the light just right. Holding them at this angle can also show off the relief of the coin and give someone viewing the photo a better idea about how it would look in-hand. The trouble with this though is that if you photograph the coin when it is tilted, only a small portion of it is in-focus because the surface of the coin is not perpendicular to the camera.

A tilt lens would let us shift that plane of focus so it runs across the whole surface of the tilted coin, meaning we can get the whole coin in-focus even when it is titled away from the camera. This is a really cool feature that may seem trivial at first but is really quite handy. On top of that, this particular lens (the AstrHori) can achieve 1x magnification. Most tilt macro lenses on the market only go up to 0.5x and cost a fortune (see Canon's line of tilt macro lenses). I'm not sure how much this one will cost yet but I suspect it will be a lot cheaper.

1 hour ago, ambr0zie said:

Never tried your idea with the mirror - will sure try it.

The mirror trick does require a certain lighting method, it's one I describe in this long guide as "axial" lighting. The idea is that the light illuminating the coin comes from directly above, providing great contrast around the devices of the coin while illuminating it evenly and producing specular highlights that bring out toning and luster. When using lighting directly from above with a mirror in the background, the mirror just reflects the light directly back at the camera and thus it appears nearly purely white.

If you try to take a photo of a coin on a mirror with angled lighting, chances are you'll just see a mirror in the background of the photo, similar to the photo I posted above showing the coin above the mirror. You may even see an entirely black background, depending on your camera setup.

But as I show in the guide on my site, even a cheap ring light from Amazon can sometimes be enough to get the "axial lighting" effect to work. The main consideration is that the ring light is not too wide in diameter, otherwise it can't illuminate its centre.

I experiment a lot with coin photography and know a few others here do as well so let's have a thread where we can throw around some ideas or share any tips we've picked up along the way. Whether you are using an old iPhone, a 10 year-old DSLR, or a fancy new mirrorless camera, all ideas and thoughts are welcome. If you're looking for help with improving your photos, I think this can be the place for that too.

I have a lot of info about my own coin photography methods on my website but it's nice to have somewhere to casually share new things I try that may not become a permanent part of my workflow but may be of use to others.

To get things started, I've turned my attention back to finding more efficient ways for background removal and have found that using reflective glass (actually a small mirror in the photo below) with a ring light providing top-down illumination works well. It produces a very bright background without making the edges of the coin bright and I can one-click remove the background with the magic wand tool in Photoshop to get perfect separation. As you can see in the example photos below, the coin even looks great on an artificial black background, you don't see signs of the original white background at all.

This is what an un-edited photo looks like, the white areas are the mirror reflecting light back while the darker grey areas around the outer parts of the image are just from a diffuser I used to help illuminate the coin's edges a bit.

Looks like it cleaned up well! I think the "after" photo is doing a lot of disservice to your cleaning job due to the harsher lighting that is really highlighting the rough surfaces. If photographed similarly to the original it would probably look much better.

Not an aureus 😁

I think there is definitely value in being aware of the photographic traits of each dealer and auction house to help make an informed decision about how the coin will look in-hand but I also think it's just as important to be able to recognise how a coin might look in different lighting conditions. I think that is perhaps even more useful because it's not as dependent on knowing who took the photo (and what their "style" is). You need to be able to look pass the effect the lighting and post-processing has had on the resultant image and understand how the surfaces might behave to different kinds of lighting.

The example below is one I took using nearly identical lighting setups yet the result is drastically different. Both photos were taken with a modified "ring light", the light source (a camera flash) was the same, the only difference was the size of the ring light body. The photo on the left is closer to how it appears in-hand but, if you only saw the image on the right, you can still get a pretty good idea about what the surfaces are like and the small hints of toning. I'd then know to expect the coin to look more like it does on the left when I get it in-hand because I know how that kind of surface will respond to light.

So I personally focus more on the physical attributes of the coin and its interaction with the lighting and pay less attention to the known photographic "style" of the dealer/auction house because it's a more definite way of knowing how the coin will look in-hand. It also helps if you can identify over-exposure vs. specular highlights and direct vs. diffused lighting, then you can differentiate between coins with regular surfaces, coins with "bright" surfaces from cleaning, and coins with good surfaces and luster.