El-Cheapo Lenses

I've got to get back in the saddle, so I took a little time to get better acquainted with my gear.
Please tell me what's good and what's bad.
Gear is Pentax K-x, coupled to Asahi Pentax Auto-Bellows, bolted to a drill press.
Lighting is 3 crane neck incandescents, 60w bulbs, ackwardly crowded around the camera. Jansjos will be an improvement some day, but as I am on an extreme budget, I may try axial lighting first. (I love that picture of Mom, but really, she wouldn't know if I removed the glass.)

All I did was crop.
Full size shots were with the Rodenstock EL-Omegar 75mm f/4.5 ($9.99 ebay.)
Tail feathers were severly cropped from a nearly full sized shot using an EL-Nikkor 105mm f/5.6. (ebay, maybe $25.)










I appreciate your input and know enough to know that I don't know what I am doing. It's more of a journey thing than a destination thing. (Which is a philosophically elequent excuse for never finishing anything.)

Thanks Ray,
I see what you mean about the rotation. Obv.: Date should be centered at bottom. Rev.: motto should be horizontal. I often rotate the coin, rather than the lighting, to get the best effect.
I tried to balance my lighting fixtures so that Lady Liberty's face was lighted from a high left, while illuminating the rest of the coin for details.
Sometimes a photographer wants to capture the aesthetics and beauty of the coin. As a VAMmer, I am often more interested in the technical aspects. Like a crime scene photographer, I am looking for evidence and to heck with WB, color, centering, and rotation. Just need the evidence. Yet, as long as I am doing one, maybe I can do the other as well. And I thought these shots were fairly artistic, (at least for me,) while capturing good details in focus.
Then came processing.
I use InfanView primarily, and after cropping, must resize to less than 400 x 400 pixels or the file is over 100 Kb and too large to upload to CCF.
In this case that is unfortunate as the sharpness of the original pictures was something of an achievement for me.
I don't doubt you have ways of dealing with that very problem, but until I learn more, my way to show sharpness is restricted to cropping a 300 x 300 from a 4000 x 2500 picture and posting the result. Hence the tail feather shot. The original tail feather pic was 5.7 Mb. Cropped and resized, less than 100 KB.
Prior to my next learning assignment, if anyone would like access to the greater detail pics, I can always PM them. Bear in mind, that my dial-up connection functions at 49 Kbps, and I have to share that line with much of the village.
Enclosed is an uncropped, but resized, pic of the original source for the tail feathers.
Someday I'll get the Rodenstock 75mm APO, but if I had it now, I wouldn't know how to use it. Walk before run.
Thanks, Kurt

My next suggestion would have been offsite hosting, as well. The images look good enough that we need them much larger to find any fault.

Nice VAM-38. It's a testament to the magnitude of the doubling in LIBERTY that it's clearly visible in such a small pic.

That last batch was better, but not what I am after.
so here is a "dummied down" of the original shot.



Followed by a cropped, expanded and sharpened image from that same shot.
Bear in mind the original shot was taken with other areas of interest in mind. However, A doubled LIBERTY is always fun.



Thanks for looking.

Try again

Very nice! The obverse looks sharper than the reverse. How are you critically focusing?

A few new EL-Cheapos today...all 75mm:

Rodenstock EL-Omegar:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...B:SS:US:3160

"Japan" 75/3.5, looks similar to a lot of brands, not sure who actually made these:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...B:SS:US:3160

And a Vivitar LU:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...hlink:top:en

All these should produce excellent full-coin shots for publishing at image sizes appropriate for online viewing.