No matter how you capture the tone, having a piece of paper or your fingers in the picture will, for the greater majority of people, detract from the presentation.
Then I guess I'm in a minority. Aesthetically, I'm not much a fan of cropped coins against black and white neutral backgrounds, I like my coins to look as if they live in the wild, as if they are handled and spent and piled on the table. I think both these presentations (if properly cropped and edited) are
good for their own purposes. Coins in hand sometimes look very nice, and from time to time I post pictures of me holding a coin - especially if it's a nice big one such as an
aes grave. Of course, the paper background have to be cropped, and I'm not adverse to having background against a coin, e.g. with a nice ticket, or a
red tray, or even a grey card. In a way, both presentations come across well for different purposes, but the paper background pics absolutely must, must be cropped to size, and stitched, so that the coin looks well; the coin in hand doesn't need to be cropped as much because holding the coin is sort of the point; it does need to be properly focused of course, which it isn't at the moment. However my own tip on both: the
choice of background (as distinct from the
choice to have a background) is critical. Either choose a nice background, or a neutral one. Here some of my coin photos with background:
