What Do You Use For Inspiration And Direction?

While your question relates mostly to lighting (I assume), I want to add that for a long time I was generally dissatisfied with my photos as I thought they were not as sharp as many I had seen published online. So many of what I had seen had this "easy to look at" quality that I wasn't getting with my setup. It was as if my photos were just a bit out of focus. I upgraded from the Nikon D5000 I was using to a D7000 in hopes of being able to use the MUP function more effectively, but the D7000 produced the same results as D5000. I spent tremendous effort working on making my setups more rigid, and tracking down lenses that would give the best possible results. Finding the Rodenstock Apo Rodagon D, the Nikon Printing Nikkors, the Tominon E36 and E36C series, and most recently the Rodenstock Scitex series of lenses was the result of this effort. In the end, pushing the limits of setup rigidity and lens sharpness, that "easy to look at" quality was almost but not quite there. Eventually I tried some experiments to prove my problem was the camera shaking when the shutter fired, and this gave me the final "push" that resulted in my current setup and method...I changed from the Nikon D7000 to a Canon T2i. Canon's EFSC capability eliminates the shutter shake that was giving my 1:1, and especially 3:1 and higher mag photos a blurry quality. Bottom line...now I shoot Canon on the bellows. the D7000 is still my walkaround camera but for coins it's Canon all the way..Ray

I found this blog entry from 2007 pretty relevant to my question. I actually had the coinimaging site bookmarked but hadn't really dug into his blog.

http://coinimaging.com/blog1/?p=6