Lighting direction when photographing coins

[dougsmit]

Three coins are shown here lighted in exactly the same manner (distance, elevation angle, bulb type etc.) but the coin was rotated 90 degrees between each shot so we have the light coming from Left, Top, Bottom and Right. The purpose is to show the importance of orienting the coin to the light direction according to characteristics of the coin. Obviously, it would be perfectly possible to adjust the coin between these quarter turns and, in many cases, this will produce better results than any of these. Rarely, if ever, will the light from the bottom be most pleasing ('ghoul lighting' named for a Halloween character lighting its face with a flashlight from below).

The coins are selected to show a bit of variety. The Ptolemy I tetradrachm (top) is toned silver while the Septimius Severus denarius (bottom) is bright. Between them is a Gordian III and Tranquillina bronze with less than perfectly even green patina. It was included to illustrate the effects of direction on left and right facing portraits on the same coin.

Most people will probably prefer examples with light from top or right (unless the portrait is left facing where top or left is probably better).



Since we expect top or right lighting to be better, these six images show the effect of more minor adjustments within those ranges. In fact, the difference made by very minor adjustments can be greater than expected. The ease of previewing this is why I prefer to use continuous lights rather than flash.

These six are not exactly evenly spaced and the yellow arrows only approximate the direction. The coin, a silver tetradrachm of Side, has a number of surface problems and scratches which show more strongly in some light angles than in others. I prefer the example in the lower left corner (roughly 1 o'clock angle) for this coin but every coin is an individual and the best results will be found by turning the coin until you see what you want.

These images vary (intentionally) only in the light direction. Other changes could be made by raising or lowering the light (a single CFL bulb) or changing the reflectors used with that bulb. Unfortunately there is accidental variation introduced by the fact that this ancient coin has a reverse that makes it hard to sit perfectly and consistently flat as would be possible with a modern coin with flat relief and raised rims. Also the imperfect alignment of the camera to the coin becomes obvious when comparing the various images. These differences do not become troublesome until you try to shoot matching images.

[Randygeki(h2)]

excellent presentation Doug.

[moonmoth]

That's nicely illustrated and well presented.  I prefer top right lighting too, the exact angle varied according to the needs of the individual coin. Or top left lighting for left-facing busts.  Also, some coins seem to need the light to be almost axial, and other need a raking light - depending on the amount of relief, the amount of contrast, and the condition of the surfaces. 

Bill

[dougsmit]

Back in the days of film, I shot coins in B&W and liked axial light best.  Color presented a problem to me that I have not yet conquered.  Axial tended to produce a glare in a different color than the basic image and that did not correct as well. 

I posted this not to show how to shoot coins but to encourage folks to look at their images before just flopping coins down in any orientation.  It does make a difference. 

[Andrew McCabe]

The fastest way to get a perfect lighting direction is to have the camera, tripod, coin and base (I used grey card) on a surface that can be swivelled or slid together (I put the whole lot on the grey card and swivel the card with the camera/tripod/coin on top) . Those who've read my posts on photography know that I always use the quickest simplest and least technical methods, I value practicality and speed over perfection. My method is to take photos in shaded daylight e.g. at an open window and to randomly rotate the whole set-up about 30 degrees in between a series of 5 or so rapid shots. Flip the coin over and repeat the rotation in the other direction. I then just choose the best obverse and the best reverse and delete the unused ones. Takes just seconds per coin, requires no set-up and no lighting and still produces images that are nicely lit - simply by choosing one of many. I've taken and uploaded 2,500 photos since last July on my website, and most of them are perfectly reasonable, clear and nicely lit, even if none of them are as good as a photo that Doug Smith or Pat Lawrence would shoot.

(I use a compact camera in every case - except where I used my mobile phone camera - I still don't know what an f-number is. So I'm a snapper rather than a photographer).

[Jaimelai]

Andrew - I was wondering if you then use a software program to edit the images, i.e. remove the background, adjust color, etc. and if so which one?  I have just been using Paint and now am trying GIMP, but still having trouble removing/changing the backgrounds.   I've tried your method, but the one flaw I see is that I am only allowed to play with my coins at night after the wife is long asleep, so natural sunlight is hard to come by.  Like your pics though!



 

[dougsmit]

It has snowed a lot here today so I spent the time inside playing with coin illumination schemes.  I decided to try bouncing the light off a large white card placed above the camera so the coin received diffuse light from all sides.  This resulted in good light for some silver but was less pleasing with darker coins.  The next stem was to mix in a little direct light with the bounce making a compromise.  This was done by allowing some of the bounced light to spill onto the area with the coin but most still was directed at the card. 


The top row on the image shows a 'normal' direct lighting result.  The middle row shows the bounce light.  The bottom is the mixed.  Each has some merits depending on which coin was used (I did this on more than these three) so I am still unable to find one set up best suited for every coin.  Overall, the mixed light seems to work well with bronze or dark coins while there is more room for different opinions on which looks best for silver.   Opinions?

[Akropolis]

My opinion: Bounce light for silver (for THAT coin, anyway) and I agree that the mixed light was best for the bronze.
PeteB

[Andrew McCabe]

Andrew - I was wondering if you then use a software program to edit the images, i.e. remove the background, adjust color, etc. and if so which one?  I have just been using Paint and now am trying GIMP, but still having trouble removing/changing the backgrounds.   I've tried your method, but the one flaw I see is that I am only allowed to play with my coins at night after the wife is long asleep, so natural sunlight is hard to come by.  Like your pics though!

I use Photofiltre. It is free (or at least the version I use is free). It has exactly the right degree of complexity for me - a lot more flexible than Paint and a lot less than Coral Paint Shop Pro. As well as allowing its download, the following page also comments on its merits and drawbacks.
http://photofiltre.en.softonic.com/

There are simple buttons to adjust gamma and brightness (which allow for my automatic camera automatically getting the brightness and exposure wrong) and if necessary I adjust the colour to match how the coin looks, which compensates for the fact that I don't control the lighting (since I use natural-light shadow my camera tends to blue-tinge most coins compared to their look in hand).

I crop using circular masques to get the white background and finish the cropping by hand. There is a simple rotation tool in Photofiltre to get the orientation correct. I have a Stitch programme that sticks the left and right side together in an appropriate way so I don't have to mess with cutting and pasting - it's a little tool that a friend has developed, it's in beta and I don't think yet available.

I don't touch anything that might alter details such as sharpness or fuzziness. I don't smooth and I don't sharpen and I don't apply any other tool that might enhance or mask details or change surfaces. All I mess with is exposure, brightness and colour, which are essentially the same factors your camera and lighting mess with. The only thing with me, is I snap first and fix these things after whereas the expert photographers in this discussion group fix them mostly in advance by correct camera and lighting. None of the coins I illustrate are ever so sale, so I have no motive in enhancing their image. I just want to make them clear and real, scratches and all. In fact I calibrate which photo I choose (in my multi-shot method I describe above) by the scratches; when choosing between images I check that scratches or other defects are clear and sharp in the chosen image as well as other factors such as lighting direction.

Most of my uploaded photos I set at a standard size of 960 pixels high after editing and stitching is complete. This is double the height of VGA and allows flexibility in reducing picture size in exact divisions of 2,3,4,5 or 6 without being concerned that the image is somehow being edited in the reduction process.

Usually when a pile of incoming coins has grown to about 10 I take some snaps and then edit them immediately, after selecting the best image in each case in my multi-shot method. I usually apply any colour correction first, and uniformly to all coins in a given group before selecting the best images. Photofiltre has a batch mode which allows me to for example reduce blue by 10% on all coins, or resize so all are 960 pixels high. Knowing they were all shot under uniform brightness it helps avoid tricks with the eyes. If I try to do it individually, after the other edits, my eyes become gradually immune to colour casts which I find only after I've uploaded to Flickr (and can compare with other coins). Colour first, then brightness and exposure edits, then stitch and resize.

Elapsed time from starting the photography set-up (first find your camera ... then grab your coins. NB: the grey card is usually the most difficult thing to locate in my book-filled living room, being .... grey) to being ready to upload on Flickr normally amounts to 10 minutes per coin, plus cataloguing time. The latter could range from 10 minutes to hours per coin depending what I discover or have to search for.

[Andrew McCabe]

The top row on the image shows a 'normal' direct lighting result.  The middle row shows the bounce light.  The bottom is the mixed.  Each has some merits depending on which coin was used (I did this on more than these three) so I am still unable to find one set up best suited for every coin.  Overall, the mixed light seems to work well with bronze or dark coins while there is more room for different opinions on which looks best for silver.   Opinions?

The mixed-light coins look best to me for bronze. I'm torn between the bounce and the mixed for silver; both look good to me but I'll vote for bounce as the brighter look is more silvery.

Would these choices also apply the same way to my most difficult subject: mirror-reflective, fresh struck, pure silver which tend to come out in various shades of pitch black when I photograph them. I know that mirror-reflective coins don't often occur with bronzes or indeed Severan silver. I've never found an adequate solution.

[Andrew McCabe]

Everyone should look at Doug's lighting-direction pics and give opinions, they are all great pics by a great photographer who works to professional standards.

When it comes to sloppy and uncontrolled amateur standards I guess my table-photography at NYINC takes the biscuit. Whilst trawling the packed aisles for coins a few weeks back I had my camera in my jeans pocket and my compact tripod in my leather jacket. A few items I looked at triggered my interest, so I asked the dealers could I take a snap. I did so there and then, no grey card, no lighting apart from harsh fluorescence, no set-up time beyond the time it took to screw the tripod onto the camera, just on the tablecloth at the dealer's booth in between the glass cases with the press of crowds at my back. Below are a couple of results, the first and second at the Freeman and Sear table, the third and fourth at the Antiqua table:

The fifth coin, with Ahala's portrait, I photographed a few days later under my normal (unlit) lighting conditions. Compare it to the Sulla coin. The coins are similar in ways, both portraits of the same year and possibly same die-engravers, both with good surfaces and little wear (I do acknowledge the Sulla is a much much better coin!). The odd thing is the Sulla coin comes out much better in terms of colour and silvery reflectiveness even though the Ahala also is of good metal and good surfaces. Somehow the photo taken when I had all aspects under my control is worse than the emergency bourse-table snap. Perhaps it is the unworn quality of the Sulla that does it, but I suspect it points out that I would be better getting some proper lighting control in my home photography set-up and trying to get good results in every case. Not just in emergencies.

Pictures below, sources:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/4285618731/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/4285610499/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/4286335792/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/4286341262/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahala_rome/4285612081/

I need to redo the Ahala photograph.

[dougsmit]

You might try shooting Ahala in a small white room (closet or bath?) and bouncing light all over the ceiling (light the room not the coin).  You are right, I don't shoot bright sparkling coins very much (the SS Legionary here is bright by my standards).  I did shoot this US coin (again three ways) which is bright but gold is easier than silver since you can always make it yellow.  Keeping silver evenly colorless is harder.



In this case the right image is a stacked combination (Photoshop Elements) of the two images left and center rather than an honestly lighted photo.  That technique is nice in that it allows you to adjust the transparancy of the top layer and stop when the combination strikes you are best.

[slokind]

I think Andrew's Sulla is excellent.  It comes to 'life', metallically speaking.
I think that the reason it is hard to keep silver evenly colorless is that, I think, it is NOT evenly colorless, especially in antiquity—and I'm not talking about iridescence or other accidents.  First, there are the impurities.  Second, there is the chemical effect of its pre-find environment.  Third, and not talking about mixed light sources of the kind usually meant, no shiny object exists in a colorless or monochrome environment.  I think that actually working in grayscale is preferable to attempts to obtain uniform "colorless" silver.
In other words, our seeing of the coin is as much what we are photographing as what we think of the coin as being.
That gold Indian is nice, all right, but sunken relief also is hard to photograph.  I like the one on the buffalo nickel better.

Pat L.
P.S. As you well know, I'm not boasting.  My last month's Hadrian won't pass muster, compared with your Septimius.
But CLICK for best resolution.

[slokind]

OK.  I added a Numismatic Chronicle volume to my stack underneath my dish-and-glass set up.  I kept my standing Ott lamp about a meter away and aimed at about 4h.  I made my righthand Ott desk lamp only about 10° from vertical and moved it nearer 12h and a couple of inches farther, radially, from the coin.  I made my lefthand Ott desklamp more nearly vertical, too, but not quite so much and moved it nearer 12h.  I always keep the lefthand desklamp the principal light source, that being what the ANS taught us so many years ago (and I don't like axial; what I do is subtler, I think).
Most important, the greater proximity of the lens to the coin made the exposure more accurate.  The denarius nearly filled the "height" of the 35mm frame.  And the greater proximity altered the depth of field so little as not to matter.
Pat L.
CLICK on image AND SEE!
P.S. Each Ott lamp is 13W ~ 60W.  That's like using 3 mini-fluorescents, total.  All other light sources are OFF.

[moonmoth]

That looks very good, better than the previous photo.  There is more contrast without losing detail. Nice!

[areich]

Do I need glasses or is the first Hadrian slightly out of focus?

[dougsmit]

Do I need glasses or is the first Hadrian slightly out of focus?

The second shot is sharper.  There are several possible explanations and I have never been comfortable selecting between them.  Some unsharpness is from camera shake.  Even on a tripod thing can vibrate.  Another possibility is that the camera is focusing on the glass rather than on the coin.  If the camera has a user selectable spot focus rather than averaging the whole, that could help.  This become suspect when focus improves when we get closer and fill the frame more fully.  Another thing is the same camera and lens well show different sharpness according to the lighting.  Generally, directional lighting should be sharper looking than diffuse but I don't think that is showing here.

We frequently point out that most coin photos are used in small size where fine degrees of sharpness are more a matter of the sharpening applied in postprocessing than in matter of camera and lens.  The fact remains that posting large (or enlargeable) images will show every chink in our photographic armor.  Just yesterday, Pat taught me how to post a larger image so those interested could see coin and photographic faults in detail.  This (same image as shown above as 'bounce') is my first try at it.  The big one shows a lot of coin faults that would make it harder to sell.  Truth can hurt.

CLICK on image AND SEE!

[slokind]

Wow!  I'll say that interjection.  Now I see.  Now I see the warm note in the shadows which makes the image look truly real.  Now I see Septimius's wonderful mustache.  That is the most wonderful Septimius head I ever saw.  That is perfect.
Needless to say, I have center-weighted, which I have come to prefer, as well as spot focus, which I'd use when I wanted a problematic detail, the rest of the coin go hang, and I have used those even when the Olympus OM4 wasn't autofocus, and I have used the center for split-image in the do-nut focus on my first 1965 Nikon, too.  My grandfather taught me how to use center emphasis on his post-war Rolleiflex.
No, I think that either my 1987 Macro lens is not quite-quite or else my CCD is, in a word, not Canon's.
Maybe next year I can add another camera to my collection.  Not this year.  It's not time.  I am still bringing my mind to bear on getting the most out of the D80 and the 1987 macro lens (which focuses at just the right distances from a coin).
Frankly, my best photos are perfectly publishable.  When you consider what the graphics people at publishers do to photos, one really should consider primarily color prints huge and on-screen, zoomable, priortiies.
Doug's and Bill's are consistently sharper with less sweat than mine.
By the way, I did not post-process sharpen, not even minimally, my last Hadrian denarius.

[dougsmit]

Quote from: slokind on Today at 07:27:21 pm
  That is the most wonderful Septimius head I ever saw.  That is perfect.

I'm not sure I'd go that far but it is a nice die.  That got me thinking what Septimius portrait I do prefer and there are a lot to choose from.  If it is a Rome die, I'm rather sure it would be one of the 193 AD portraits.  There always are the Eastern portraits and I have favorites from early 'Emesa' and Alexandria as well.  It is hard to choose among your children.

Who has a denarius portrait die of Septimius they like better?

I'll offer two (below and clickable) that are quite different than most but I find pleasing.

[Randygeki(h2)]

all great photos, but yeah there last two portraits are more appealing

[slokind]

Not a great photo, not a great specimen—indeed, a very sad, evidently burned specimen—but if you ask for my favorite portrait, since it was Doug himself that taught me to like AD 193 by choice, well, here is my favorite Septimius.
•• 01 04 AE sestertius  Rome, Septimius Severus, laureate, head to r. [IMP] CAES L. SEPT    SEV PERT AUG.  Rev. Fides stg. l. with victory on her hand and segionary standard in her r.  [FIDE]I . L[E] G T R [P COS].  S  C.  RIC p. 180, no. 651.  AD 193.  Listed there as scarce (but in this condition,...).
Yes, CLICK to see every trace that remains.
Pat L.

[slokind]

I couldn't get much closer, so I used spot-reading for exposure, and it worked.  It may not be a perfect photograph, but it's as small as many a tetartemorion, and much shinier than most of them.  I thought 600 pixels wide was as big as a 7mm coin ought to be, so here it is.  No need to be clickable.
•• Macedon (Aigai) AR hemiobol  7mm 0.263g  axis 12h.
Archelaos (413-399 BCE)
Head of Herakles to r.
Rev. Head of lion to r. (club above—not visible), the A of AR(chelaos).

Again, Doug Smith's influence.  If you can't get the larger ones (and I love pre-Alexander Macedonians), get a very nice tiny one.  Also, anyone who wonders why a century ago serious persons began protesting calling the obverse of the ATG 4drs a portrait of him: they were aware that long before Philip thought of getting an heir Herakles was already a Macedonian obverse type.  This smidgeon of silver is of the same period as Doug Smith's Syracusan Arethusa with a lampadion hair-do, which is just as tiny.
Pat L.

[mihali84]

I photograph all my coins using pretty primitive methods, a white sheet of paper, paper clip box to stabilize my camera on, and the 6ft tall living room lamp (with some light coming from the kitchen).  I have found a good spot under the lamp, about four feet away, where i get the right amount of shine without blowing out the highlights.  As we all know each coin then requires a good amount of turning and adjusting to find the right angle of attack so to speak. 

Here's my latest challenge, the picture is pretty self explanatory, two shots, same angle.  I thought that by bouncing the light from the opposite side i would get better detail and the coin would be more evenly lit.  As you can see the coin is more evenly lit, but the image on the right without the bounce emphasizes the relief more and thus brings the image to life.  I found that most of my Tetradrachms photographed well from the same angle, putting emphasis on the face, highlighting the hair, cheekbones, forehead, and chin.

Doug, Pat, i envy the quality of the photography which you have displayed here, definitely top notch, kudos.  Another problem i'm sure were all faced with is the growing number of pictures stored in the computer, i hate to delete any image of my coins, bad or not.

[click to enlarge]

[dougsmit]

May I suggest replacing whatever you are using for bouncing the light with a gray card or moving it farther from the coin.  I frequently overdo the bounce making it look artificial when all I want is to light the edge a bit.  I very recently changed to gray and have liked it better. 

[mihali84]

 Doug that sounds like a great solution. I used the white paper the coin was on, folded up against the box i use to stabalize, definitely overdid the bounce.  I look forward to trying out the grey paper, i'll post some new pics soon.

[dougsmit]

[dougsmit]

[Randygeki(h2)]

[James Anderson]

[Matthew W2]

[Mark Z]

[dougsmit]

[Mark Z]

[Danny S. Jones]

[dougsmit]

[Danny S. Jones]

[dougsmit]

[Danny S. Jones]

[dougsmit]

[James Anderson]

[Matthew W2]

[cmcdon0923]

[slokind]

[Danny S. Jones]

[James Anderson]

[moonmoth]

[dougsmit]

[slokind]

[moonmoth]

[Danny S. Jones]

[James Anderson]

[slokind]

[slokind]

[Danny S. Jones]

[moonmoth]

[Danny S. Jones]

[areich]