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

[ozjohn 488]

Your setup is much more sophisticated. I just attached my Sony  5000 camera fitted  with  E mount macro lens to an Aldi tripod. the coin was placed on a sloped matt black surface. The camera position was adjusted to be normal to the coin.  The photo was taken using a delay to minimize movement with a clip on  LED desk lamp probably 3000 K. for illumination. The image was cropped and the file size reduced using irfan  64 photo editing app.

[Silverlocks 78]

My macro lens is the F3.5 30mm - https://www.wexphotovideo.com/sony-e30mm-f35-macro-lens-1526009/.  It was about £180 or so.

I think the images look fine - certainly sharp enough.  A bit of specular reflection would certainly bring up the lustre, especially if you've got some where the original finish is substantially intact (I got to cheat a bit as Gillick sovs were never circulated so tend to be in good nick).

According to the interwebs the A5000 also supports tethering (see below) and the sensor has a native resolution a little bit smaller than the A6400 (about 20m vs. 24m pixels).  With my setup at about 15cm from the subject a sovereign comes out at about 1,200 pixels across natively on the sensor, which is plenty.  A crown should be something like 2,000 pixels wide on yours at the same distance.  The spot was a Smallrig RM01, which was about £30 off Amazon IIRC.  The double ball joint things were made by Neewer https://www.wexphotovideo.com/smallrig-double-ball-head-with-cold-shoe-mount-14-screw-1709974/ and can be gotten from your choice of vendor.  Suitable tripods should be amenable to a little google-fu.  If you've already got a ring light it's probably fine.

What I got in the example above was just the result of a few hours tinkering, including the frigging about to get everything set up and working.  I don't think it should be hard to do at least that well.  I do suggest that you experiment with tethering software - Sony makes Imaging Edge available as a free download and it works fairly well.  Adobe makes a free RAW conversion utility that will convert ARW files to DNG that Photoshop will import.  If you haven't got Photoshop Darktable will import ARW files, and according to the interwebs there is a plugin for GIMP that will read DNG files.

The big win for me with tethering software is that you can zoom the image from the camera up to the whole screen so even with my aging, decrepit eyesight I can see if it's in focus.  It also makes it quick to tweak and round trip the results.

TL;DR: You can get much the same results with the camera you've got and maybe a few bob spent on extra lighting.

 

Edited May 20 by Silverlocks

[ozjohn 488]

Sounds like you have a similar  macro lens to me.  To be honest I just move the SD card from my camera to my desk top out of habit as I mostly down load a lot of photos at the same time . I will certainly try your techniques to try and improve my coin photos.

Many thanks

[Silverlocks 78]

1918S George V Sovereign

[Silverlocks 78]

1930P George V Sovereign I think this is a weak strike - if it was a forgery I'd expect the rim to be much more blobby and poorly defined.

[Silverlocks 78]

The Gorgeous Georges, Part I Here's an attempt at shrinking the JPEGs down to small enough to make a small photo essay fit into the image allowance in one post.  The photos are re-sized to 512 pixels across and saved with the lowest quality before the detail loss becomes significantly noticeable ('2' on Photoshop, with baseline optimised scanning).  Most of the images are about 60K or so. 1913 George V Sovereign

1915 George V Sovereign

1925 George V Sovereign

1927SA George V Sovereign

Edited May 21 by Silverlocks

[ozjohn 488]

I use the Irfan 64  Resize app where you can chose the amount of pixels to suit. Also it is very easy to merge the obverse and reverse images. With regard to your 1930 SA sovereign the rim seems to be raised indicating it was not correctly located in the press when it was struck.

[Peckris 2 1,911]

On 5/21/2023 at 11:03 AM, Silverlocks said:

The Gorgeous Georges, Part I Here's an attempt at shrinking the JPEGs down to small enough to make a small photo essay fit into the image allowance in one post.  The photos are re-sized to 512 pixels across and saved with the lowest quality before the detail loss becomes significantly noticeable ('2' on Photoshop, with baseline optimised scanning).  Most of the images are about 60K or so. 1913 George V Sovereign

1915 George V Sovereign

1925 George V Sovereign

1927SA George V Sovereign

Wow, those are very good for Photoshop 2 (out of 12)!

One thing to remember is Photoshop always saves a larger file than other apps - without resizing I always re-save Photoshop jpegs using Apple Preview and usually the file sizes are 2/3 of Photoshop's.

[Silverlocks 78]

On 5/23/2023 at 9:49 PM, Peckris 2 said:

Wow, those are very good for Photoshop 2 (out of 12)!

One thing to remember is Photoshop always saves a larger file than other apps - without resizing I always re-save Photoshop jpegs using Apple Preview and usually the file sizes are 2/3 of Photoshop's.

I tried running it through an online compression tool called compress or die and knocked about a third off the file size, so one could probably get half a dozen coins into a post.

Before

After

[Coinery 804]

2 hours ago, Silverlocks said:

I tried running it through an online compression tool called compress or die and knocked about a third off the file size, so one could probably get half a dozen coins into a post.

Before

After

A very pretty collection of sovereigns, it has to be said! Thanks for all the pictures!

[Silverlocks 78]

9 minutes ago, Coinery said:

A very pretty collection of sovereigns, it has to be said! Thanks for all the pictures!

Thank you.  Finally splashing out on a camera made all the difference.  You can't really light them like this with a smart phone.

[Silverlocks 78]

Victoria Sovereigns Here are some nice Victoria sovs. 1869 Sheld Reverse

1876 George & Dragon Reverse

1877S Shield Reverse

1887 Jubilee Portrait

1895M Mourning Portrait

Edited May 25 by Silverlocks

[Silverlocks 78]

Edward VII Sovs And, as we ran out of space on the previous post, here are a couple of Edward VII sovs. 1903 Edward VII

1907S Edward VII

 

[ozjohn 488]

Very nice collection of sovereigns. Although I do not specifically collect sovereigns I've managed to collect some on the way along with other gold coins.

[Silverlocks 78]

8 hours ago, ozjohn said:

Very nice collection of sovereigns. Although I do not specifically collect sovereigns I've managed to collect some on the way along with other gold coins.

Thanks.  These are the nicest (or perhaps the most photogenic).  So far I've only done sovs and a bit of modern silver, although I shall probably do some other gold coins at some point.    

[blakeyboy 1,491]

14 hours ago, Silverlocks said:

I tried running it through an online compression tool called compress or die and knocked about a third off the file size, so one could probably get half a dozen coins into a post.

I email the coin pic to myself.

I can choose the rough file size before sending.

Very quick and easy, but does your way compress so that better detail is kept?

[Silverlocks 78]

5 minutes ago, blakeyboy said:

I email the coin pic to myself.

I can choose the rough file size before sending.

Very quick and easy, but does your way compress so that better detail is kept?

You can adjust the amount of detail to keep.  Some programs use different algorithms to analyse the detail, which can be more or less efficient.  The trick is to adjust it to just before the point that the detail being thrown away becomes visible.

Some programs also use more or less efficient compression algorithms.  Photoshop seems to err on the side of quality, others (you can get online or desktop apps) seem to be better at throwing out detail and making smaller file sizes.

I also tried a free app called Caesium, which seems to use a more size-efficient approach.  It has a slider that lets you select the level of compression.  The pics in the Victoria and Ed postings were done with that.

On other forums like TSF they don't have the size limits, so I just post larger images.

Edited May 26 by Silverlocks

[Iannich48 187]

The nice thing about those sovereign pics is that they are virtually the same size as the actual coins.

[Silverlocks 78]

3 hours ago, Iannich48 said:

The nice thing about those sovereign pics is that they are virtually the same size as the actual coins.

They're 512 pixels across.  If you're looking at them on a phone they might be a bit squinty but they look ok on a PC.  I've got some nice high-res ones but they're too big to upload onto this site.  I'm not sure why, but it only allows 500k per posting.

There are some 800 pixel ones further up the thread.  They're higher quality but you can only get one obverse and one reverse per post.

Edited May 26 by Silverlocks

[Silverlocks 78]

Here are a couple at a larger size for @Iannich48 - A George V and a 1959 Gillick.  These are resized to 960 pixels and may be a bit easier to see.  At this compression/size you can get 4 images or so in a posting. 1918S George V

Never mind.  This is clearly not going to work for reasons I have no control over and I've run out of patience for troubleshooting it.

 

Edited May 26 by Silverlocks

[Peckris 2 1,911]

13 hours ago, Iannich48 said:

The nice thing about those sovereign pics is that they are virtually the same size as the actual coins.

Eh? They are about 3 times the size!!!!

[Silverlocks 78]

3 hours ago, Peckris 2 said:

Eh? They are about 3 times the size!!!!

I think they would be quite small if you were viewing them on a phone.  The screen on my Samsung Note 10 is about 400 dpi, so these images wouldn't be much more than an inch across on it.

[Silverlocks 78]

Here are a couple of coins at the full size of the photos.  When I take them with the camera about 15cm away from the subject, the coins come out about 1,200 pixels across; I've cropped these to 1,280 pixels in total.  At highest quality the JPEGs are about 2MB each; here are a few examples  compressed small enough to get an obverse and reverse per posting, so I've made up several posts.  @Iannich48 - here are some larger images, hopefully big enough to see the detail on your device. 1974 Machin (1280px)

Edited May 27 by Silverlocks

[Silverlocks 78]

1966 Gillick (1,280 px)

Edited May 27 by Silverlocks

[Silverlocks 78]

1918S George V (1,280 px)

Edited May 27 by Silverlocks