Edges of Coins Photo Setup

Photographing the Edges of Coins

There are eleven pages about photographing coins:

Black Background — White Background — Photographing the Edges (this page) — Using Extension Tubes — Choosing the Best ISO Setting — Choosing the Best Aperture — Choosing the Best Exposure — Editing the Background — Keeping Detail in the Highlights — Processing Your Image — Some Final Tweaks

Stand for photographing the edges of coins on a white background It's easy to photograph the obverse and reverse of coins, but the edges are less easy to capture. You can use some sort of stand with a padded crocodile clip, and I used to do that with my black background setup, but that is awkward to use, and the device shows up too strongly to work well with the white background setup.

Stand for photographing the edges of coins on a white background The stand shown on the right is easy to make. You can use any small, flat plastic container. This one once held a camera memory card. I used a Stanley knife (sharp, strong and pointed) to cut a slot about 13mm (half an inch) long and just a bit wider than most small Roman coins. (Please take care when using sharp tools.) A coin of denarius or similar size will stand up in this slot and lean over a little to one side. The scratches you can see are not ideal, but don't show up in photos because they are too far out of focus. The small piece of wood visible to the right of the coin is a wedge cut from a matchstick, which I use to hold thinner coins in place. I keep this inside the container so that it's always on hand if I need it. I cut it very short so that it would tend to stay out of the field of view, or at least, out of focus.

There is room on this stand to cut another slit, larger or smaller, if I find I need one.

This stand sits very simply on top of the stage I use for white background photos. You can tilt the coin a little to suit your needs, and turn it to bring the desired section of edge into focus. If you choose a container made of similar plastic to your stage, it will blend in very well. In fact you can see this effect in the photo on the left. Even like this, it's hard to see the details of the edge stand.

The coins I take most edge photographs of are fakes or flawed in some way. I do this to show the oddness of the edge. Actually, there is a good case for taking edge photos of all coins. Otherwise, what are you going to compare the odd ones to?

The coin in the top photograph is definitely genuine. On the right, above, is an unprocessed photo of the edge of a fake denarius. Below that is the same photo after processing in Photoshop. You can see that the background comes out a nice neutral grey. You can actually just see the outline of the slot, but this is close enough in tone to the rest of the background that it's easy to process it out using the techniques shown on later pages. You can click on this photo to see how I fitted it in with my record of the coin.

It may also be worth looking at the middle of this page to see several photographs of broken and whole coin edges. I gave various amounts of tilt to the coins to give different effects. On that page, the Sasanian dirhams – big and thin – were held in place with my wooden wedge. The tetradrachm of Thasos was too thick for the slot in the stand, and I propped it up with some UK pound coins. I tilted that one far enough so that the modern coins didn't show in the part of the photo I needed.

For those who are interested, the photograph on the top right was taken hand-held with my Canon Ixus 60, using macro mode, in natural light from a north-facing window. That's a nice little camera.

There are eleven pages about photographing coins:

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