Here's My First Pic, Need Some Critique.....

Dont be too hard on yourself you did good.
Wasnt aware there was an egg shaped penny out there, is this a new error.

You have the lights very low to the coin, resulting in "side lighting" that strongly brings out the surface features and creates a 3-D effect. It also highlights the design elements of the coin with a bright halo. This lighting is good for some types of shots, such as documentation of varieties or dramatic emphasis of 3-D surfaces, but in general you will want to bring your lights up to a higher angle to the coin. A great starting point is 45-60 degrees from horizontal. This will darken the edges of the features and brighten the surfaces. Ultimately, on business strike coins, you will want to have all the design elements outlined by shadows rather than highlights to have the best overall effect.

Think about how you look at a coin holding it in-hand. Most folks will hold the coin slightly tilted so that the light source reflects ALMOST directly off the coin. Most coins are in holders, and when the light source reflects directly off the coin there is surface reflection and glare, and you naturally tilt the coin a little to keep the glare off the coin. Well, this is exactly how you want to position the lights so they are as high as you can get, backed off just enough to not cause direct reflection and glare. Try it yourself, and try to reproduce with your camera what you are seeing when holding the coin in-hand.

It is possible to tilt the coin and still get an acceptable shot, but it takes additional equipment to make it work, or more post-processing, which will reduce image quality. There are such things as "tilt-shift" lenses that are designed for "perspective control". These are designed to mimic the "movements" of large format "view cameras" that are used for architectural photography.

For numismatic photography, if the lens axis is tilted, the difference in light path length can compensate the coin tilt and keep the whole coin in focus. But the result still has some distortion, and the coin does not appear round. By shifting the lens it is possible to intentionally distort the image so that the coin goes back to round. So with both tilt and shift together you can make a tilted coin appear round and flat.

That's the theory anyway.I have tried using "tilt" adapters and was able to compensate the focus/DOF issue but the coin was still out of round. I actually just purchased a tilt-shift capable bellows (Nikon PB-4) but have not tried it out yet. I still have a question about whether it's better in numismatic photography to tilt and shift the camera or the lens, and I intend to use the PB-4 to figure this out. But this will be the subject of a completely different thread once I get some results.

Thanks guys,now I have a little better idea of what I'm after


Good call on the lighting rpm..the lighting was very low on the coin,i'll try raising them for my next batch of pics


And i'll do that with my next group of pics
Oh,and by the way my name is Rick,and I'm really learning a lot here and hope to keep progressing>>>>>THANKS