Playing with lighting (axial vs. direct)

Nice. Once you try this with true glass rather than thin acrylic, you'll realize that the CD case was just teasing you.

You can achieve pretty much the same effect by using a single, diffuse light as close to 90-deg to the coin as you can get, and very slightly tilting the coin toward the light. It's a whole lot easier than axial lighting and the results can be better because you have a lot more flexibility in lighting compared with axial, and you don't have to deal with the whole reflecto business.

Ray, as always you are a genius! Just curious, which of your many lenses and setups did you use for those shots? I hope my bellows, adapters, and at least one of my new lenses get here by the weekend so I can play! :)

Thanks again, Brandon

Hi Ray, I played with the direct overhead lighting setup like you recommended, and the results are FAR better than the attempted axial lighting. I think this little guy is complicated by the fact that he's in a PCGS slab...so axial makes for a lot of reflection issues. :) Thanks again for your help!

Here is an Austrian silver piece from 1963 graded MS68 by NGC. It is a restrike of a gold 2-Ducat piece from 1642. I used an axial-type method for lighting of the slab to show off the prooflike surfaces.

The image was taken with an EL-Nikkor 75/4 lens attached to my bellows, and scaled to fill the sensor with the coin image. I had the aperture closed down one stop to 5.6 for the shot, and I used two Jansjo lamps with a semi-diffused light source. The final images are rescaled to approximately 800 pixels square.

Hi Ray. My favorite so far is the EL-Nikkor 75/4N which I used on this latest shot. I also have a few other 75mm lenses I picked up for dirt cheap:

1) Vivitar 75/3.5 ($18)
2) Vivitar-LU 75/3.5 ($16)
3) EL-OMEGAR 75/3.5 ($16)
4) Spiratone 75/3.5 ($24)

All of them perform well if your goal is to capture a coin fully in the sensor, and resize the final image to 800px square. There are pixel peeking differences if you zoom all of the way in, and the sharpness differs a bit between them (5.6 may not be optimal for all of them -- like, I think the Spiratone was cleaner at f/8 or even f/11. Nonetheless, for lenses on the cheap, I can't complain. If I had to rank them I'd go with:

1) El-Nikkor 75/4N
2) EL-OMEGAR 75/3.5
3) Spiratone 75/3.5
4) The two Vivitars (I don't see any difference between the non-LU and LU lenses).

The sharpness and chromatic distortion of the EL-Nikkor is superior to these <$30 lenses for sure. I paid about $70 for the Nikkor 75/4. BUT, the crazy thing is (as I mentioned), even the worst performer is still really fantastic quality.

Do these observations jibe with your 75 shootout? I remember reading that thread, it was very helpful!

-Brandon

Yep, pretty much same as what I saw. The Vivitars, while not as good as the Nikon, are still quite decent for the application and have a flat field, which is often more important than how sharp the center of the field is.

Just wait til you get that 75ARD1...Ray

Brandon...I think that was in my original "Coin Photo Setup" thread but not sure which page and it's a long thread.

Recently I installed a mirror permanently to my stand, and then I set a hard plastic reversible disc on top of the mirror, and coin on top of that. Very convenient setup.

Procedure is simple...

Set up for coin shot and focus on the coin
Replace the coin with a mirror and stop down aperture
Adjust side-side and front-back tilts until image in viewfinder or live view is looking directly at the center of the lens

Here's what it looks like on my setup...80mm EL-Nikkor



...Ray