Coin aquisition of the week.......

[Coinery 734]

59 minutes ago, DrLarry said:

Ok thanks so it is normal for there to be 0.33 grams lost ...that is most helpful thanks 

There’s clearly metal missing - 0.33g isn’t a lot of gold in physical terms!

[DrLarry 409]

I will take some pictures of the edge 

[Silverlocks 54]

1915 George V Sovereign Acquired a few days ago.  Nice EF with most of the original finish intact, but one or two significant handling marks and scratches.

[Silverlocks 54]

1887 Boehm (Jubilee) Victoria Sovereign This is in excellent condition, a comfortable EF with a large portion of the original mint finish intact, and very little wear on the detail.  Taken with axial lighting.

Edited March 21 by Silverlocks

[ozjohn 472]

My latest acquisition a MS 62 1913 florin. A nice coin with some toning and a little weak on the obverse above the King's ear. The reverse is a little weak in the upper shield which is normal for the series. and one of the harder dates.

[VickySilver 648]

Very nice appearing....Perhaps a better lit picture.

[Peckris 2 1,840]

Very nice indeed.

[Nonmortuus 742]

I haven't posted for a while,  the way the coin market has gone nuts since covid has really limited what I can afford to add to my collection. That said I did add this 1919 Half Crown, NGC have it as MS 63, formally CGS80.

Edited March 24 by Nonmortuus

[ozjohn 472]

Very nice

[Sword 1,227]

The toning (particularly on the reverse) is superb!

[VickySilver 648]

The overall surfaces are very nice as well. Possibly as nice as I have seen.....

[Nonmortuus 742]

2 hours ago, Sword said:

The toning (particularly on the reverse) is superb!

Yes, it is gorgeous in hand. How it didn't grade higher I don't know!

[Bruce 151]

2 hours ago, Nonmortuus said:

Yes, it is gorgeous in hand. How it didn't grade higher I don't know!

Grading is always a mystery 😅

[Sword 1,227]

13 hours ago, Nonmortuus said:

Yes, it is gorgeous in hand. How it didn't grade higher I don't know!

I could look at it all day! It is a splendid specimen, and there would be no excuse for it not to be assigned a very high grade if the obverse strike is a little stronger. 

(But I don't think I have seen an example as nice as this and with a stronger strike)

[Peckris 2 1,840]

23 minutes ago, Sword said:

I could look at it all day! It is a splendid specimen, and there would be no excuse for it not to be assigned a very high grade if the obverse strike is a little stronger. 

(But I don't think I have seen an example as nice as this and with a stronger strike)

yes, if there is anything at all which lets it down a bit, it's the hair detail from the temple down through the sideburn to the cheek.

[Paulus 1,806]

This week's budget-busting acquisition (crown)

[Kipster 32]

I picked up this duodecimo Halfcrown at auction last week. Some weakness in the reverse centre, but overall a nice addition.

 

 

[Coinery 734]

3 hours ago, Kipster said:

I picked up this duodecimo Halfcrown at auction last week. Some weakness in the reverse centre, but overall a nice addition.

 

 

I do love a bit of William, always seen them as a very striking series.

[Kipster 32]

4 hours ago, Coinery said:

I do love a bit of William, always seen them as a very striking series.

Likewise. Quite the profile has old Billy.

[azda 963]

On 3/25/2023 at 1:21 AM, Bruce said:

Grading is always a mystery 😅

My thoughts exactly, this being graded as XF45

[Silverlocks 54]

I didn't acquire this coin, but I did acquire a new camera - A Sony A6400 and a macro lens that works quite well for sovs.  Here's a 1958 Gillick.  Lighting is a small ring light held about flush with the end of the lens, and a little LED spot shining in from about 10:30.  Enjoy.

[ozjohn 472]

Nice coin and photo. Shows the coin's luster well.

[Silverlocks 54]

4 minutes ago, ozjohn said:

Nice coin and photo. Shows the coin's luster well.

Music to my ears.  Doing lighting like this was next to impossible with the smart phone, but dead easy with this camera.  The holy grail is showing off both the detail and lustre while flattering the coin and not highlighting scratches and contact marks too much.

Pure axial lighting makes the coin look too flat - even the ring light does that a bit.  Being able to get the spot in from the side (hard to do for various reasons with the phone) lets you illuminate the coin and show the detail with the ring light while showing off the lustre with the specular lighting from the spot.

The problem with the smart phone is with its macro lens attached, it wouldn't focus more than a few cm away.  I've got the camera sitting with the lens about 15cm away from the subject, and a ring light that just fits over the end of the lens.  This gives incident lighting at just off axis but with a low enough incident angle that it doesn't reflect too much off the edges of the effigy and make for a ghostly effect.  As there's now no phone body in the way, I can get the spot in at the right angle and distance.

I've been wanting to do this lighting setup for a while and it works every bit as well as I hoped it would.

Edited May 19 by Silverlocks

[ozjohn 472]

2 hours ago, Silverlocks said:

Music to my ears.  Doing lighting like this was next to impossible with the smart phone, but dead easy with this camera.  The holy grail is showing off both the detail and lustre while flattering the coin and not highlighting scratches and contact marks too much.

Pure axial lighting makes the coin look too flat - even the ring light does that a bit.  Being able to get the spot in from the side (hard to do for various reasons with the phone) lets you illuminate the coin and show the detail with the ring light while showing off the lustre with the specular lighting from the spot.

The problem with the smart phone is with its macro lens attached, it wouldn't focus more than a few cm away.  I've got the camera sitting with the lens about 15cm away from the subject, and a ring light that just fits over the end of the lens.  This gives incident lighting at just off axis but with a low enough incident angle that it doesn't reflect too much off the edges of the effigy and make for a ghostly effect.  As there's now no phone body in the way, I can get the spot in at the right angle and distance.

I've been wanting to do this lighting setup for a while and it works every bit as well as I hoped it would.

I've always struggled with photographing coins. I've tried iphones and my Sony camera with a macro lens mostly with poor results even with a light ring. Nonmortuus a contributor to  these forums suggested putting the coin on a sloped mount with a black mat to make it normal to the camera lens and illuminate with a LED light as high up as possible. I've found this gives satisfactory results. I will continue to experiment and try to incorporate your techniques.

[Silverlocks 54]

This is how I set it up.

The camera itself is mounted on a little desktop tripod, with an adjustable gantry that lets you twiddle the position of the camera.  In practice the gantry isn't really necessary.  The ring light is mounted on a tripod with a double ball joint dohickey, and the spot light is mounted on a smaller, flatter tripod with the same type of double joint.

The ring light gives you a relatively flat base lighting and the spot gives you the specular reflection and anisotropic reflection from the surface finish.  The stack of books just raises the subject, and the copper bar is a paperweight to keep the books flat. I'm using black construction paper as a background - I bought a packet of it off Amazon. Other folks like microfibre cloth or velvet, or you could do a light background with white paper or card.  You'll have to provide your own sovereigns.

The PC screen in the background is significant as I'm using the camera through tethering software.  Sony provides a tethering application for their cameras called Imaging Edge - in fact, the primary reason I got a Sony camera was that it had good support for tethering.  In theory the A6xxx series should also play nicely with open source photo applications, but I haven't been able to get Darktable to mount it (although it does recognise the camera).  Imaging Edge is free and seems to work fairly well with a few limitations.

• It doesn't have support for automated focus bracketing, as far as I can tell.  There are third party apps that theoretically do this.  Currently I haven't thrashed out a solution for this.  You would need this to do focus stacking if you wanted to take a coin from any angle other than straight on.  Photoshop will do the focus stacking if you have the images, but I haven't worked out a way to do this with the A6400 under tethering control yet.
• It will export to JPEG, but only at relatively high grades (i.e. images too big for the measly size allowance supported here).  I had to import the files into photoshop and then re-save with a lower detail setting.  Fortunately you can still get decent image quality at settings that will produce images small enough to upload here.
• Sony's native raw format (ARW) isn't directly supported by Photoshop, although it is supported by Darktable.  Fortunately Adobe publishes a conversion utility that will export DNG files that Photoshop can read through its RAW file importer.

On the plus side, it works well with the lighting and it's far easier to get decent pics with than the smart phone.  The camera cost me £650, which is about as cheap as I've seen it.  I got it from a grey market box shifter but you might pay closer to £1,000 from a real camera shop.  The lens was £185 from another online retailer.

In practice a secondhand A6300 would do the same thing just as well, and I did seriously consider getting one.  You can get those for about £350-400 off Ebay or other secondhand vendors.  The tripods and lights would be about another £200 or so in total, although I have some other lights as well not being used in this setup.  I think the price for this sort of setup could be kept to about two sovereigns if you went with a secondhand camera body.

Edited May 20 by Silverlocks