My 2010 America The Beautiful 5 Oz Silver Bullion Coins

I use a really cheap $90 Nikon CoolPix camera with 8 megapixels. It's really just a snapshot camera, but it does have a nice macro feature that takes some really nice closeup shots as well.

Once I take the pictures, I bring them into PhotoShop where I adjust the color balance and light levels a bit. In the case of highly reflective silver objects like these, I also usually end up desaturating the image completely so you don't see the bright red reflection from the camera.

For a picture like this one, the real "secret" is simply to photograph each coin separately and then crop and combine them together into a single image rather than trying to photograph all five at once. That way I can have a consistent light source for each coin.

It's not particularly high tech, but the results speak for themselves and I didn't have to spend hundreds of dollars on equipment.

Yeah, that's the same way I photographed my 7070 album. It works soooo much better than photographing the entire page at once.

They are absolutely gorgeous

They came! They Came!

Here's the 2011 "Uncirculated" set from the mint with the "vapor blast" finish:



For a comparison, here's the 2010 set with PL surfaces:



It's basically just a difference between shiny and matte finishes.

Too bad I couldn't take pictures of that quality before I sold a few of my 2010 ATB 5 oz sets on ebay!

Great pics, barry! Which style do you prefer? Olympic looks pretty striking in VB, based on that pic, however Mt Hood looks hard to beat in PL.

In other news, since the 2010 set I purchased came from a dealer and are the "bullion" versions, they didn't come with any boxes of COAs -- just plain plastic capsules. I suppose that doesn't really matter if you look at these as purely silver bullion, but as a coin collector I felt they needed a little more pizzazz.

For around $40 I found a nice custom wood display box over at APMEX that arrived yesterday:



Yeah, I know the box doesn't add to the value (unless perhaps if I decide to sell to another collector someday), but it makes me happy...

Yeah, I don't mind the OGP for the collector coins. They stack neatly and look nice. The bare plastic capsules the bullion coins came in just irked me for some reason. The nice thing about the wood display box is that the holes are big enough to hold the coins in the capsules, so I don't lose any protection.