Meepzorps
I remember a while back you were soliciting input on what equipment and technique to use, what do you usually use now?
cw
Hi cw,
Regarding my equipment, nothing has changed. I shoot my photos on my kitchen table. I use my kitchen light fixture, which contains a CFL bulb equivalent to a 100 watt incandescent bulb. I use my father's old
work light (from the 1960s), which I clamp to my kitchen light fixture. It also contains a CFL bulb equivalent to a 100 watt incandescent bulb. And I also use an old desk
lamp, which I purchased back in the 1980s when I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan. It contains 2 long tube-style fluorescent bulbs. Offhand, I don't remember the exact wattage.
I shoot all of my photos with my niece's old
Apple iPhone4, which is now several years old. Yes, I am
still using it. And no, I
still don't own a digital camera.
I place my coins on a medium grey towel. I make a kink/ridge in the towel so that I can tilt the coin at various different angles to change the light reflectivity. I usually place the coin at a 10-30 degree angle relative to the kitchen table. I hold the iPhone about 4-8 inches from the coin. I usually tilt the iPhone at another 10-20 degrees relative to the coin, both horizontally and vertically. I found that this technique yields the sharpest photos. I usually shoot 8-20 photos of each
side (
obverse and
reverse), at different varying locations in the iPhone's view
field. I keep the best photo and delete the rest.
For some reason, my iPhone has difficulty shooting photos of small coins. Sometimes, I must shoot 50-60 photos before I finally get one that isn't blurry. The smaller the coin is, the higher the percentage is of blurry photos.
I "process" my photos on my HP laptop computer, which is now 13 months old. Actually, all I do is rotate and crop them. My photos are all "raw photos". They are not modified or filtered or processed in any way, shape, or form whatsoever. I don't have time for that. I have thousands of photos to post in my website.
You may have noticed that my photo
quality has improved as time goes by. That is because I am gaining experience. Despite numerous "swap-outs", I am
still not satisfied with many of my
Magna Graecia photos, which I shot first (before I
had experience). I'll probably go back and re-shoot the sub-par photos at some point in the future. I may also re-format some of my
Magna Graecia website pages.
I store all of my photos and website pages on a 32 GB flash drive. I delete my photos from my computer's hard drive on the following day.
Regarding my website pages, I am
writing all of the HTML code myself from scratch. I use a HTML kit so I can see the page before uploading. I upload using Filezilla.
Meepzorp