Any tips for Gold coin Photography?

[rasiel]

Anatomy of poor technique

Here's a coin I've shot twice, and twice failed. It's nothing to do with it being gold. The main problem is sub-optimal lighting.

When you look at any gold or no toning silver coin look at the darkest and lightest areas. A successful shot should still have details at both extremes.

In the top photo not only do I have areas that lose some detail but overall the fields are flat and unevenly lit (though the flan is a bit wavy to be fair). Moreover, in my excitement at getting a prized entry I've rushed it to the photo station before taking a minute to clean some lint that was clinging on.

In the bottom photo I've improved the evenness of the lighting on the fields but I've blown the highlights again and made the dark ones darker still. It's also a touch out of focus. And there's still a bit of lint.

This aureus deserves better! I'll have to take it in for a third attempt. Luckily, for me at least, getting quality shots is part of the fun of collecting and handling them for the photo sessions is after all an opportunity to you know, be with them again!

Rasiel

Edited April 20 by rasiel

[HipShot Photography]

12 hours ago, rasiel said:

Hell of a shot! (and a rare opportunity too)

Rasiel

Yes indeed! Three 1-kilo coins at once was a first for me. I've shot plenty of gold kilo bars, or even bigger ones, but kilo coins don't surface very often. Only 50 of the Lacrosse coins were minted, but less than a quarter of them were sold. Another coin from the same series fetched $90,000 US (approximately $117,200 Cdn.) at auction a few years ago. 

 

If you're wondering, the coin and bar image above was shot with a single light - essentially a bare bulb -  about 2 feet behind it, and up at about a 30-degree angle, placed behind a layer of Lee 216 diffuser, and some small reflectors in front. It takes some tweaking to get the camera angle, the light angle, and the placement of the diffuser just right to light it but not burn it out. 

 

 

 

Edited April 21 by HipShot Photography

[rasiel]

36 minutes ago, HipShot Photography said:

Yes indeed! Three 1-kilo coins at once was a first for me. I've shot plenty of gold kilo bars, or even bigger ones, but kilo coins don't surface very often. Only 50 of the Lacrosse coins were minted, but less than a quarter of them were sold. Another coin from the same series fetched $90,000 US (approximately $117,200 Cdn.) at auction a few years ago. 

 

If you're wondering, the coin and bar image above was shot with a single light - essentially a bare bulb -  about 2 feet behind it, and up at about a 30-degree angle, placed behind a layer of Lee 216 diffuser, and some small reflectors in front. It takes some tweaking to get the camera angle, the light angle, and the placement of the diffuser just right to light it but not burn it out. 

 

 

 

Beautiful, top end work! Hats off. You should get an award for that last one.

I did some shots for JM Bullion a few years ago. Big chunky bars. Not fun for me but it was sobering to hold six or seven figures in one hand 😅

Rasiel

[HipShot Photography]

2 hours ago, rasiel said:

I did some shots for JM Bullion a few years ago. Big chunky bars. Not fun for me but it was sobering to hold six or seven figures in one hand 😅

Rasiel

Cool..  I'd like to see the pictures. Were the bars you shot newly minted, or kinda scratchy like the ones I had? 

 

 

[AncientJoe]

Your pictures are really beautiful, @HipShot Photography!

[rasiel]

4 hours ago, HipShot Photography said:

Cool..  I'd like to see the pictures. Were the bars you shot newly minted, or kinda scratchy like the ones I had? 

 

 

Oh this was ten years ago. All that stock photo portfolio gets turned over frequently. I'm sure it can be retrieved from web archive.

Here's a couple

 

[HipShot Photography]

On 4/19/2024 at 7:21 AM, theotokevoithi said:

A post of an unedited photo of a coin and a software-edited photo of the same coin is a good idea.

Here you go... this is about as "in hand" as you can get. Shot with my cell phone. My apologies to the thread, this is not a gold coin. 

 

 

And this is my axial lighting image, processed in Photoshop.

It's not that different. 

 

[HipShot Photography]

I shot the gold coins below a few days ago, both with my axial lighting set up. I use a single light 500 W studio light (with a 30-degree honeycomb grid)  on the right side, passing through a layer of Lee 216 diffuser that I positioned closer (or farther away) from the coin as needed, for different levels of contrast. In this case, the diffuser is fairly close to the coins, about 6" away, for a soft even light.  It can be up to 15" away for high-contrast light.

 

 

[HipShot Photography]

This image is not shot with axial lighting but uses the same single light as mentioned above, positioned behind the coins, using the same diffuser and a few small mirrored reflectors in front to throw highlights on the edges of the coins. As always, the position of the camera relative to the light, and the position of the diffuser make all the difference.

 

 

[Heliodromus]

2 hours ago, HipShot Photography said:

This image is not shot with axial lighting but uses the same single light as mentioned above

Awesome photos, as expected from you!

Are these single-shot images or HDR exposure blends?

[HipShot Photography]

1 hour ago, Heliodromus said:

Are these single-shot images or HDR exposure blends?

They're single-exposure images, I don't use HDR for coins (but I love it for building interiors) however, on rare occasions, I will use luminosity masks.  This image was shot with a macro lens, so it's a 10-frame focus stack to get the entire shot in focus.  Of course, you'll notice the entire frame isn't in focus. That's because I wanted a shallow depth of field for this image, so after it was focus-stacked, I used the tilt-shift in Photoshop to put the focus area on a different angle than my camera gave me, and made it as wide as I wanted it.  It's best to create a separate layer as a smart object so you can tweak the tilt-shift effect. This image was intended for cropping for either horizontal or vertical presentation in online ads. The best part, I still have the fully focused version if I need it for something else. 

[lordmarcovan]

I would imagine the convex scyphate shape of the coin in the OP also likely caused some challenges with lighting?

Then again, the second one looked OK.

I’m a pretty lousy photographer (mediocre to adequate on my best days), so I usually repurpose the seller photos or have PCGS or NGC image my coins for me.

So the photographs in my collection come from a variety of sources, but I edit them all into a standard template for a matching format.

Sourced from CNG images:

Sourced from PCGS TrueView images (I was a big fan of Trueviews during the tenure of Phil Arnold at PCGS.  Nowadays, less so.  I don’t think Phil did this one.):

 

Sourced from my own wretched cellphone shots through the slab plastic (lighting is the bugaboo that bedevils me the most):

 

Sourced from NGC Photovision images (NGC’s Doug Plascencia does great work, and I’m sold on their Photovision service.  I have them/him shoot all my ancients now):

 

So, my unhelpful tip for good gold coin photography?  Let the pros do it for you, unless you just enjoy the process and experimentation of coin photography for its own sake, as I suspect most of you here do.

For me, good photography is vital, as my coins are shared mostly online and spend all their time locked in a safe deposit box.  But the process of photographing them is more like a chore and less like fun for me, so I take the lazy man’s way out and pay the pros 90% of the time.

Edited April 28 by lordmarcovan
Typos, typos everywhere