Gold Coin Photography

[Hallmark Coins]

Hello to the Forum.

 

I am strarting out here as well as in the company. We deal with gold coins and part of my job is to photograph coins for the website and catalogue. I am using Nikon with 100mm Tamron prime lens and whitebox with two light sources. I think the main concern for now is to position the light in such way to highlight fine details and get that lovely liquid yellow glow to the edges.

 

I'd like to share what I have come up with so far and would welcome your opinions or suggestions on how that can be improved.

 

 

 

Many thanks in advance,

 

Elliott Basker

[Art1.2]

Hello Elliott and welcome to CoinPeople. Hope you get to share and learn here.

[altyn]

These are lovely images! I like that softness of light that shows on many of them. However, if you want to make some of them look more contrast or to highlight details, then I suggest to try Kaiser halogen lamps. This is a very powerful light source (300W - and it becomes very hot, so be careful). This type of lighting is rather harsh, or I would say ruthless, showing all minute details of the field and devices but sometimes this is exactly what one needs. The set up is well described in the book by Mark Goodman "Numismatic photography".

[hiho]

Gold coins are especially hard to photograph and you have done a very good job Elliott.

 

I got lucky with this Swiss Shooting Medal, both being able to own one and then actually getting a decent photograph...