FORVM`s Classical Numismatics Discussion Board
Numismatic and History Discussion Forums => Coin Photography, Conservation and Storage => Topic started by: Ron C2 on February 04, 2021, 09:19:57 pm
-
I've been playing around lately with my camera setup for photographing coins and am curious what others are currently using.
Here's my latest setup:
(https://www.forumancientcoins.com/gallery/albums/userpics/51928/normal_20210202_185652_resized.jpg)
I'm using a micro four thirds Olympus E-M1 camera (16MP mirrorless camera) with a 50mm 1:2 f2.0 macro lens (100mm f4 1:1 in 35mm equivalent). I sometimes also add a 1.4X teleconverter. I'm also using an Olympus TTL dual-gun macro flash. I set up on a rigid tripod with a mall head and levelling bubble. I use canned food as an adjustable height coin surface with the coin on a white index card.
Depending on the coin, I do have to play around a bit with the distance form the lens to the coin, flash intensity, etc. to bring out a decently detailed image with some 3D to it. Previously I was using a ring flash, but it was flattening the images too much. There ends up being zero shadow and you get no depth to the coin's details.
So what are you using now?
-
Well ....
I had (past tense) been using a Canon Rebel XS on a small copy stand, using the 18-55mm kit lens either alone or with addition of a Raynox DCR-250 macro conversion lens (highly recommended) as seen attached to front of lens below. For lighting either sunlight (preferred) or IKEA Janso LED lights, sometimes with a plastic milk bottle diffuser (sitting on table there).
For focusing I was either using Live View manual focus (on camera LCD screen), or more conveniently tethered shooting using my PC to control the camera (coin displayed on 30" monitor for focusing).
That was a decent setup, although the Janso lights really arn't up to the job. Lighting is key.
Then, being too cheap to buy a decent macro lens, I decide to experiment with a self-assembled franken-lens made out of a El Nikkor enlarger lens coupled with a focusing helicoid and necessary adapters. The magnification is insane (I would have needed a taller copy stand to get sufficiently far away from the coin), but the lens has no electronics so I've ended up burning out my Canon image sensor by overexposing it! :'(
So, my current setup is just using my iPhone resting on same chopped up milk-bottle, using timer shutter release to avoid shake. Lighting options are same, with sunlight preferred. It's not the best, but in less than 10sec (5sec per side) you can have an entirely serviceable photo. Here are a couple of on-boarding photos taken with this setup this morning. I use GIMP for joining/rotation and to adjust white level.
I will get a new DSLR body soon, but for time being the iPhone is OK.
Ben
-
Here's another from the iPhone using manual focus this time. I'm using the Halide camera app which supports focus peaking, which makes it tolerable, even though I'd certainly prefer focusing using an image that fills a 30" monitor rather than a 1/2" image on an iPhone screen!
Ben
-
I graduated, a long time ago, from using a flatbed scanner to a camera, and the results are finally presentable. I've purchased better equipment as the technology evolved.
I currently use an Olympus Micro Four Thirds camera (EP-L) with a bunch of features that I use a lot. This camera gets up to 16 megapixels, takes a macro lens (the 60mm with a 2x crop factor makes it equivalent to a standard 120mm lens) with a touch flip screen. The really nice bits about a modern mirrorless or SLR camera are the control over white balance, shutter delay, bracketing exposures, center-weighted exposure metering, and the ability to stop the exposure up or down. I use an on-screen grid and the 'bubble' levels. I use auto-focus now, but I do sometimes miss my old kit and the manual focus.
My stand is homemade and isn't nearly as slick as the ones in this thread. Still, it lets me use axial lighting with a glass plate to 'suspend' the coins in air.
I haven't really been happy with the lighting arrangement until now. This is my fourth iteration with this rig over ten years.
I use three rechargeable battery-powered LED lights: two Lume Cubes and one Lume Panel-mini, all with diffusers. The Lume Cubes have 'barn doors' to narrow the light beam, and I use one for the axial light, at max., and one for the background, to dispel shadows. I can control the Lume Cubes with an app on my phone or tablet. The panel light is used as soft direct lighting, and is moved around as needed to get the right surface illumination on the coin.
This setup takes nice enough pictures that, after HDR processing of the multiple exposures, I don't have much post-processing to do.
-
Neat setup.
Those Lume Cube lights look really nice. I'd had my eye on the Apature Amaran AL-M9 but the Lume Cube panel looks even better. These mini panels seem ideal for desktop directional lighting. The cube lights look good too - nice set of accessories available for them.
Do you always use the combination of axial plus directional (from panel) lighting, or is it an either/or choice depending on the coin? I'd have thought that the axial lighting would remove any shadows created by the directional light.
What are you using to position/support the panel light, and how are you diffusing it? Is the Lube Cube Panel Mini additional rubber diffuser effective?
Is there any particular reason you're using the two types (panel + cube) of light, rather than one type for both purposes?
Ben
-
Good questions... you know what to ask.
I have traditionally used two lights, one main light for axial lighting and the other for soft direct lighting. Axial is good for overall soft lighting, and the second light is helpful for filling out or providing some definition to legends and devices.
My first Lume was the panel mini, which replaced an ailing brick-sized LED panel. The Lume panel mini is 3.7 volts, 1200mAh, 0.5 watts, lithium. It is physically small and light, and boasted digital controls with fine tuning and the ability to set the light temperature. The rubber diffuser comes with the mini and works like a charm. I place it atop one of my two Joby GorillaPod Flexible Mini-Tripods topped by the Lume-brand triple cold shoe mount (for multiple lights and microphones). The triple-mount isn't really necessary, but it provides some counterbalance for the panel, which I've tilted at about 80 degrees (that is, nearly horizontal), which could otherwise pull down the lightweight mini-tripod. I usually keep the panel running at just 5% to 20% brightness, but mostly keeping it at 15%. If I were using it for my main lighting source, I would probably step up to their larger panel model.
The cubes came later. I got the two-pack and found a use for the second to banish shadows in the background. The barn doors really help to direct the light where you want it, and only where you want it. The diffuser is a bit redundant for axial lighting, but I still use it.
I like the cube for axial lighting because it is a single source of light. I have found that the panel's collection of little bulbs complicate the axial lighting, causing unwelcome reflections. It might not be a problem for all axial lighting; it could be because of my second glass plate, the one that supports the coin. I had tried a ring light, and that was the ultimate bad choice, as it reflected directly back into the camera (like shooting a flash into a mirror). Oh, the horror!
I'm not familiar with Apature Amaran. The heavy/fragile lights I was using before were LED Video Lights from LS-Photo Studio.
Cheers~
-
Thanks.
I think I'll buy one of these panels and start experimenting with that. I like that the mini comes with the additional rubber diffuser, although generally more light is better so I need to decide between that and the larger "Go" panel which unfortunately seems to only come with the built-in diffuser (too close to the LEDs to really be effective?).
I'll bear the GorillaPod in mind but I'm going to try a flexible gooseneck arm for the panel for total height & angle adjustability. I'd like to speed up the time that lighting adjustments take when trying to photograph a difficult coin. My holy grail would be to reduce the degrees of freedom to two - direction and angle of incidence.
There's an interesting axial setup at the link below, from a professional photographer, who is using a lazy susan to control lighting direction, but in his setup it's the coin that is moving relative to the light and camera which would seem to be annoying (hard to assess lighting with rotated coin image on screen). Ideally it'd be the light source that is moving relative to the coin, which I think may be achievable with a mini panel. The trick would be to add angle-of-incidence (basically light height, while keeping centered on the coin) into the mix too ...
https://hipshotphotography.com/pro-tips/2020/9/24/advanced-coin-photography
I wonder if the reflections you were having with the ring light may have been due to the type of glass the coin is resting on? There is a type of non-reflective glass that is sometimes used for photo frames that might help.
Ben
-
This is the system we use most often...
http://www.quickpx.com/products/brands_en/quickPX_compact_en.html
-
Thanks, Joe.
I've often wondered what type of setup you pros are using!
Ben
-
I'm also using an Olympus Micro 4/3rds - an E-M1 with 60mm macro lens - on a copy stand.
I've got an LED panel on the camera and sometimes additionally use the daylight lights shown in the photo', though they're not currently attached. I raise the coin above the background, control the camera using a mobile 'phone, set to manual, f/10, focus and shoot.
ATB,
Aidan.
-
Hmm... maybe I should just get a copy stand! :) I do have the 30/3.5 MFT Macro lens as well as the FT 50/2.0 Macro lens with MMF-2 adaptor to fit MFT. The 30mm does focus bracketing though...
-
Hmm... maybe I should just get a copy stand! :)
+++ Sure, get a copy stand. While they can get large, both in size and cost, you can get a nice, sturdy one of modest dimensions and cost that works nicely for coin photography. I like the Cosmo Mini 500. It is compact and just feels nice and solid. It can hold the weight of a DSLR and lens. Mine cost me under US$150. It has a base that's 12"x12" and a vertical post that's also 12" and has an adjustable arm that can be flipped up to go as high as 17". There are smaller models, like the Mini 300 and the Mini 100 (which I see used with smartphones).
-
By the way, great to see that at least three of us are using Olympus MFT cameras!
ATB,
Aidan.
-
Cannon 7D Mk1 with 100mm macro lens.
-
My setup has evolved quite a bit over the last few years as I took the photography aspect more seriously. I focus stack all my images so have a linear rail powered by a stepper motor and custom Arduino controller for setting the start and end points of the "stack" (as well as other things) so it will take all the photos for me automatically.
This is close to how it looks now:
(https://cdn.artemis-collection.com/spai/q_lossless+ret_img/https://artemis-collection.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/DSC04432-768x992.jpg)
(https://cdn.artemis-collection.com/spai/q_lossless+ret_img/https://artemis-collection.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/20210314_135905-768x1024.jpg)
-
I love that stand!!
-
Thanks! The aluminium square tubes that form the L, the black aluminium base (with many holes in it), and the adapters that combine the two are mostly Thorlabs gear. It's a bit pricey as it's optical-grade equipment but after changing my setup frequently over just a few years I feel like I'm finally done throwing money away and have found something optimal. The dovetails on each side of the square tubes work near-perfectly with Arca clamps for cameras too.
-
What camera and lens combo is that?
-
I love that stand!!
Thanks! The aluminium square tubes that form the L, the black aluminium base (with many holes in it), and the adapters that combine the two are mostly Thorlabs gear. It's a bit pricey as it's optical-grade equipment but after changing my setup frequently over just a few years I feel like I'm finally done throwing money away and have found something optimal. The dovetails on each side of the square tubes work near-perfectly with Arca clamps for cameras too.
What camera and lens combo is that?
It's a Sony A7R III and Laowa 100mm f2.8 2x macro. The lens is entirely manual but for coins it's perfect and the ability to go above 1x magnification is great. It's also excellent optically too.
The Sony A7R cameras are expensive but I feel they're definitely worth it for this kind of photography where you're shooting a stationary subject in macro and focus stacking the images. The A7R II is particularly affordable at the moment too.
-
Quite the setup, kaleun96. Nicely done. Focus stacking is quite the technical accomplishment, automating the process and layering stitching on top is simply amazing!
I hope you will share your collection here some day.
-
I really like your website. That said, there is photo hosting here at FORUM as well, and you might consider hosting some of your photos here for the threads you might use to dicsuss your pieces. I'd love tosee more of your collection with such photography results.
-
Thanks Ron, I'll keep that in mind if the need arises! I see the upload limit is 2MB and most of my photos are ~20MB and then compressed down to 3-4MB via a Wordpress plugin. It is probably easier in that case to hotlink to one of my photos hosted on my website instead of reuploading them - though that does mean the links could die at some point if my website doesn't outlive Forvm!
-
If you make a double sided view of a coin about 3500 pixels in length in photoshop, it works out to around a 1.3MB photo and retains more than enough detail under JPEG quality 10.
For consideration.
-
Ron,
You are correct, but for those of us who keep high resolution pictures, producing a photo for upload on Forum takes a series of steps that you have to do for every photo. Some sites, like Facebook, will take almost any photo and then down convert it for the jpeg web version. I don't even keep my pictures in jpeg format at all. So, when I upload one to Forum, I open my original and make a copy, resize/reduce resolution, etc. The results are throwaway pictures that take a few minutes to produce. Not a big deal, but it is if you are doing volume or are rushed for time. Just saying there are reasons why people prefer to link to their pics. I haven't started a gallery yet, but this concerns me because it doubles the work since I want high resolution tiffs that are all too large to upload. The few pics I have uploaded to Forum, I delete after because I am old school and remember when space was a huge issue on computers (my first computer had no hard drive at all and the first one with a hard drive was 10 MB). LOL. I guess I am just saying that I get the hesitation.
Thanks,
Virgil
-
I get it, though in reality I keep my 3500 pixel phots as my masters and delete the large files. I'm never going to print a single coin in poster size, and the detail is perfectly fine at 3500 pixels wide. Give it a try and judge for yourself on a single coin. Ask yourself if greater resolution would be useful on a coin photo.
-
I think the large files are worth keeping, though for a different purpose. I keep two sizes: an original at ~50MB and a scaled-down version at 20MB. The latter version I upload to my website and compress to use it as the main photos of the coins on my website. The original version I use specifically for my "Ultra Zoom" tool, where people can get the full benefit of my high resolution images without needing to download the entire 50MB file in their browser.
You can see the Ultra Zoom photos here: https://artemis-collection.com/showcase/ultra-zoom/
It uses a plugin called OpenSeaDragon, which is also used by a lot of museums (e.g. British Museum) and even some auction houses (maybe Tauler Fau), and only loads the portion of the image that is visible in the plugin's window and only to the resolution required for the given zoom level. You can see reasonably fine details on the surface of each coin with this tool, more so on smaller coins than larger coins as they're taken at higher magnifications. A lot of these details get obliterated when compressed by 20x so it's nice to have a way of retaining the detail and making it available easily to others. Otherwise my camera setup is a touch overkill ;D
That doesn't mean I can't create a third copy of my images compressed to <2MB but uploading them here means adding another place to manage them and they also can't be viewed to their full potential. I'd likely end up linking the high-res or Ultra Zoom versions anyway as I think coins are fascinating to see up-close and not many others offer this kind of resolution for their coin photos. I can understand the benefits of hosting images on a forum to prevent deadlinks but I created my website partly as a means of getting around file size limits on forums.
-
Ron and kaleun96,
Ron, I tend to agree, but I have the storage space and I do other kinds of photography (in fact, I actually suck at coin photography, LOL). So, for me, high resolution is just where I am coming from. But, my coin photos probably don't need to be.
That said, kaleun96's site tells me why high resolution is so nice. That is a very nice site and your coins and images are amazing. I also like to see the details, you have done an incredible job, my goodness, some of the zooms are just beautiful. I am going to check this technology out when I get some time. Thanks.
Virgil
-
Thanks Virgil, appreciate the kind words!
-
Please do not use quote when responding to the most recent post. It is unnecessary and requires unnecessary scrolling. Quotes are only necessary when responding to an older post to make clear that you are not responding to the most recent post. I have removed many unneeded quotes from this thread.
-
I never noticed an issue with quotes on this thread. so I have no idea if I am one of the offenders. I use quotes when I think they are necessary, including when responding to the post just above. Looking back, I think you removed quotes I put in a response intentionally and I really don't appreciate it because you essentially changed my response. Quotes are especially useful with long posts making multiple points and I am responding to specific things in it. Nothing is worse than reading a response where there is no reference to what the response is about. I edit the quotes to leave what I want left. I will say that quotes have never been an issue to me the entire time I have been on this forum. More often than not, I find them helpful. Otherwise, scrolling on by is not a problem. Most comments really require no scrolling at all with or without quotes. But, when I use quotes, it is completely intentional and not out of laziness and it actually takes more time to use them. I actually think it is courteous to use them. This is also the case when responding to multiple points, where I separate the quotes between my responses. I will keep using them when I think it is needed, so delete away. Sorry, you really hit a sore point with me on this one.
Virgil
-
I also have no idea if you were one of the offenders, but almost every one of the last ten or so posts on this thread had a quote of the FULL post above, for no valid reason. Some had quotes within quotes within quotes of the full prior posts. Members were hitting quote when they should have simply replied. I have been moderating this discussion for nearly 20 years. I really do know how quotes should and should not be used. My message was for those that do not know how they should be used. I am pleased the you know how to use them but disappointed that you think it is necessary to explain them to me.
-
I graduated, a long time ago, from using a flatbed scanner to a camera, and the results are finally presentable. I've purchased better equipment as the technology evolved.
I currently use an Olympus Micro Four Thirds camera (EP-L) with a bunch of features that I use a lot. This camera gets up to 16 megapixels, takes a macro lens (the 60mm with a 2x crop factor makes it equivalent to a standard 120mm lens) with a touch flip screen. The really nice bits about a modern mirrorless or SLR camera are the control over white balance, shutter delay, bracketing exposures, center-weighted exposure metering, and the ability to stop the exposure up or down. I use an on-screen grid and the 'bubble' levels. I use auto-focus now, but I do sometimes miss my old kit and the manual focus.
My stand is homemade and isn't nearly as slick as the ones in this thread. Still, it lets me use axial lighting with a glass plate to 'suspend' the coins in air.
I haven't really been happy with the lighting arrangement until now. This is my fourth iteration with this rig over ten years.
I use three rechargeable battery-powered LED lights: two Lume Cubes and one Lume Panel-mini, all with diffusers. The Lume Cubes have 'barn doors' to narrow the light beam, and I use one for the axial light, at max., and one for the background, to dispel shadows. I can control the Lume Cubes with an app on my phone or tablet. The panel light is used as soft direct lighting, and is moved around as needed to get the right surface illumination on the coin.
This setup takes nice enough pictures that, after HDR processing of the multiple exposures, I don't have much post-processing to do.
nice work.
axial lighting is a great technique and it's easy to set up a home-brew rig that works pretty well like this one. i built one from a cardboard box with black paper lining. the little block keeps the axial light from hitting the coin from the side, which would give some odd lighting highlights. mirrorless cameras are very inexpensive now and give 'wysiwyg' results and many have movable screens. it's simple, inexpensive, and very effective. you can also use manual focus inexpensive macro lenses from older film cameras with adapters. macro lenses are, imho, important and you chose one that lets you get far enough away from the coin (focal length) to let the light work properly.
a $400 mirrorless camera body can make 6000 x 4000 pixel images of excellent quality if you use a macro lens that lets the coin fill up most or all of the field of view. more expensive ones make 40 (or more) megapixel images that you can use to make poster-sized razorsharp prints. big prints of ancient coins are pretty cool. I had some 10" x 20" prints made of some favorites that I like a lot. it would be easy to go even larger. for those who like experimenting the higher-end mirrorless cameras have 'pixel-shift' systems that create super-refined color in extraordinary high resolution (up to 200+ megapixels). it's time-consuming but it's the digital equivalent of 'dye-transfer' technology from the 1950s as far as color fidelity is concerned. great for bronze coins or toned coins. you can turn the ancient die-maker's art into photographic art you can hang on your wall.
Some cameras can use USB camera control to bring the pic right into the computer and don't have to pull it in later from the camera's SD card. That can also control exposure (shutter, white balance, etc.) from the software. some cameras also have a little HDMI output so you can see the camera's-eye view of the coin on a big computer monitor and not have to depend on the typically small camera screen itself.
thanks for showing this setup.
PtolemAE
i light what you did here - clever and likely gives very good pictures.
-
Making large wall prints is a cool idea.
Honestly, anything 16MP or higher in a mirrorless format like 4/3 or APSC will make amazing photos if you use macro lens and decent lighting. I tend to favor very high apertures also, as the greater depth of field is helpful with magnification.
Anything up to poster size, 16mp is all you need and there are some great Panasonic and Olympus 4/3 mirrorless offerings, new and used, for under $400 and a decent macro lens cam be had for around $300 new.
When you consider the cost of nice coins, a nice camera rig is not so out of reach.