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Coin Photographs with a Black Background


There are eleven pages about photographing coins:

Black Background (this page) — White BackgroundPhotographing the EdgesUsing Extension TubesChoosing the Best ISO SettingChoosing the Best ApertureChoosing the Best ExposureEditing the BackgroundKeeping Detail in the HighlightsProcessing Your ImageSome Final Tweaks


Camera setup for black background This is the setup I used for the older shots on this site which have a black background. I used a very simple camera setup. This is a Canon EOS D60, quite an old model as I write this page but still working well, with a Sigma 105mm f2.8 EX macro lens. This lens is also an old model, and has done great service. The autofocus has broken, but I don't use that anyway. The depth of field on coin photos is so shallow that manual focus control is essential.

My earlier photos were taken using a hand-held flash and a reflector. Then I thought I should try out the method Doug Smith told me about, using two light sources for modelling, and that was good. If you haven't already, I suggest looking at Doug's setup. You can see how much I learned from (i.e. pinched ideas from) him. Now, though, I mostly use a single light source and a reflector. Here, the light source is off to one side of the coin – the side away from the viewer. This gave me the best modelling effect.

This setup uses a piece of black velvet as a background. Some people like a tinted background, some use white. I use white now, created as you'll see on subsequent pages, but black can be very effective. I prefer not to use colour, so that there can be no effect on the colour of the coin. Here, the velvet lies on a piece of wood that can be adjusted under the camera – this is easier than moving the camera.

This light source is a cheap desk lamp with a piece of aluminium foil as a reflector. Both are easily movable and adjustable.

Screws and hole for use in coin photography To hold the coin away from the background, I used a screw which was hand tightened into a hole in the wooden base, with a piece of rubberised tape on the head of the screw to stop it from scratching the coin. This also helped to hold the coin in place. There is a coin on the screw in the large photo. The picture to the left also shows a smaller screw which I used for particularly tiny coins.

The screws were only lightly screwed in by hand, into this shallow prepared hole, so that they could be tilted and swapped over easily. The tilt is useful, because these coins are rarely flat and they often don't balance on the screw head in a flat plane relating to the lens.

The flecks of dust on the velvet, and the texture of the velvet itself, don't show up if the plane of focus is far enough away, with the coin on the head of a screw. If I placed a coin directly onto the velvet, these distractions showed up very strongly, and this is the main reason the screws are needed.

Antoninianus of Aurelian with a Concordia Militum reverse That's about as low tech a setup as you could get. There is just one other thing. The light source I used has a yellow tint (it's a normal incandescent light bulb) and the modelling effect means the coins are more strongly lit on one side than the other. To correct for this I needed Photoshop, which immediately makes the whole setup a lot more expensive! But I had that anyway, as I like to take photos and play with them on my computer. And you need a decent computer too, to run Photoshop ... but there are other, cheaper alternatives to Photoshop.

Here's a decent black background photo to demonstrate the results. It's an antoninianus of Aurelian from the Siscia mint, 270-275 CE. This looks OK standing by itself, but in fact it's not easy to get the correct tone for the coins. They tend to come up brighter than real life. But sometimes, this may be the effect you want. Most of the photos on this site have a white background.

Since this page was written, I have updated both my camera and my lens, but I still use this system when I want a black background.


There are eleven pages about photographing coins:

Black Background (this page) — White BackgroundPhotographing the EdgesUsing Extension TubesChoosing the Best ISO SettingChoosing the Best ApertureChoosing the Best ExposureEditing the BackgroundKeeping Detail in the HighlightsProcessing Your ImageSome Final Tweaks


The content of this page was last updated on 27 January 2011

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