Given your limited equipment your photos are already pretty
good and the coins look nice. Some of the beautiful pictures you see online were snapped with top end cameras. So you can already be proud of what you've taken with a point and shoot. A couple of experiments may improve your photos a
bit more
- the point and shoot probably has far better specifications than your microscope camera. These have been discussed quite a
bit on
Forum and the conclusion is that the cameras within are more akin to the $10 units installed within a mobile phone than to a $200 point and shoot. So I'd focus on the latter for continued experiments
- using a photographer's grey card as background (costs about $10 from photographic stores) may
help with colours and ambience.
- try experimenting with lighting. For photographing difficult bronzes with glossy reflective surfaces such as the Vetriano, it can sometimes
help to use diffuse, natural light, rather than artificial. We are in mid
winter now and the sort of light you'll get from a
north facing window (wrap up and open that window if you can) on a cloudy day is the most perfectly diffuse light you'll find short of an expensive indoor set up using those
umbrella diffusers. So, make use of that wonderful free daylight
- it can sometimes oddly
help to pull the camera back slightly from a frame-filling view in order that the auto settings adjust for the background (ideally grey card), rather than the
software trying to process the best settings for a glossy dark green surface. Such a surface would probably not be in the auto settings repertoire of a typical point and shoot, and the settings may be defaulting to something you'd not planned. With a little more background in the picture, you may get a more natural look.
This may not
work however with the coin on a rod method, as you may struggle to get the camera to focus on the coin if you've more background than coin, and if at the same time that background is more distant than the coin. However you may need to decide what's more important to you, a nice coin, or a nice background. The coin itself may photograph better with a natural in focus background. You are aiming for an out of focus background so that the coin stands out, but in achieving that your better background may come at the expense of a less
good photo of the coin surface, given that a point and shoot may just not be equipped to establish a
good set up for glossy dark green (whereas its on
home ground when most of the frame has either a grey or a multicolored background, multicolored averaging out to grey).
An alternative to achieve the same aim is to try setting the "white balance" manually while pointing at a grey card (or at a pure white background) and then moving the coin into shot before focusing and shooting. I don't do this alternative, although some recommend it, as I've found that natural variations in ambient lighting if shooting in daylight means you'd in principle need to set up for each shot, and it is a
bit fiddly. But some recommend it.
- You mention non-glare
glass. This confused me. Are you taking photos through
glass (don't!) or does this relate to a filter on the camera, or is it window
glass in a daylight shoot, or is it background? I'm just unsure what you are referring to, though evidently the less
glass involved the better.
The above are a few basically free of cost ideas that might improve your already
good photos when using a
cheap point and shoot camera. There's nothing like messing about and experimenting of course, and I think these pics are already
good in the context of your basic camera. I'd struggle with my own higher end camera to photograph any bronze with a dark glossy
patina.
