Is THIS coin photogenic? ah... no, not quite.

[rasiel]

following up on the photogenic thread i wanted to present a case that one gives the best critique of a coin photo when you judge the photo and not the coin. when people are asked to submit the best photo of a coin they own they reflexively tend to show a near-mint state gorgeous coin. even if the photo itself is poor we love the eye candy!

here is a photo i took of an absolute wreck of a coin. it pains the eyes to look at this mess - but i consider the photo itself to be pretty good. i'd rate it at about 8.5 out of 10. i took it in less than optimal lighting and the shot itself was not the best. look carefully and you can see that the image is ever so slightly blurry, the exposure is dark and looks to me dull, the image is undersaturated, the reverse is overlit and the f/stop i picked is too shallow leaving the edges unacceptably out of focus.

shame on me ;-)

ras

[slokind]

Congratulations.  I'd have tried to do the same (only is the coin really so pink?).  It's an ugly coin, in sad condition, but an excellent photo for illustrating it.  Photographers often find homely subjects, rich in textures, photogenic--and they can be, indeed.   This coin would be more photogenic carefully lit and photographed in high resolution in grayscale.  Also, it would profit by retaining its natural background.  Those are my aesthetics for photography, and I've meddled with it all my life (also teaching History of Photography for fifteen years).  But there are thousands of justifiable aesthetics for photographs, whether of coins or persons or still life or landscapes or anything whatsoever.  Pat L.

[ras]

i guess the bottom line is that when it comes to photographs there really is more than one way to skin a cat. in my case (i photograph coins professionally) i'm always aiming to capture what the coin really looks like in hand and fuss endlessly over it. the results are technically accurate when i'm satisfied but not necessarily artistic. of course, when a client wants me to make the coins look like the photos from this dealer or another i comply but when they leave it up to me i make the photos match the in-hand experience which you might interpret as cold and clinical. and i take a different approach altogether to coins bound for print.

i suppose if someone insisted to make them look artsy, the hardest request, i would just add that old soft focus look and a warming filter. but to me, personally, that would be to ruin a good coin photo :-)

ras

[bruce61813]

I'd have tried to do the same (only is the coin really so pink?).  It's an ugly coin, in sad condition, but an excellent photo for illustrating it. Pat L.

Sorry about the paraphrasing. But the coin is that pink in general, I have some similar ones. The terriable scaring of the flan is characteristic of bronze disease. Generally it is masked by a surface coat of copper carbonate, but if there is something else coating it, like a mixed carbonte and gravel coat, that would be removed [this coin appears to have have been subjected a low level electolsys, but this is conjecture on my part, I was looking at the black still on the smooth portion of the flan]
or come off by itself during cleaning. This would fit in your "study" thread, maybe Ras should have posted it there.

Bruce

[moonmoth]

I think I know what Ras means here.  I am very pleased with this photo, but the coin is not going into any "best of" categories.  It has lots of interesting detail, though.  (It's a base metal so-called "limes" denarius of Caracalla, the original being RIC IV 120, a galley sailing to the left.  Despite the rusty appearance of the corrosion, lack of magnetic response tells me that there is no iron in this coin.)

I used my usual crude Pat-oid photography setup and did some work with Photoshop to bring out the information thus captured.  Photoshop is essential to my coin photos.  On this one, for example, I did this:

- Made the background white using the paint bucket.
- Adjusted the levels setting by bringing in the end markers to improve the tonal range.  Keeping well away from any automatic adjustment!
- Adjusted the curves setting and the contrast setting very, very slightly to improve the visibility of detail.
- Adjusted the saturation down a bit to compensate for the effect these three adjustments have.  This needed careful work in detail to tone down the yellows, cyans and reds while retaining their natural tones.
- Brought out some shadow detail by selecting a colour range (black with fuzziness of 50), feathering by 10 pixels, then using image/adjusments/levels on the selected tones.
- Converted to the desired image size and used some unsharp mask on the result.

None of this added any detail that is not there in the coin, and on my screen, what you see is the same as you see if you look at the coin under a bright light.