Best I Can Get On A $400 Budget? Help

Alright! Everything has arrived, although I thought I'd be waiting until mid-June for the extension tubes.

Now for the learning curve ._.

I tried to get a decent shot of this 1900 IHC that I had around. The first of each picture is simply cropped; the second is also "sharpened" to 4.0, whatever that actually means, but I wanted to get opinions on its use, etc.









I hope the pictures load, when putting through the free optimizer, they said under 300kb, but when I uploaded them, it said they were slightly over. Oh well, guess we'll see (or not). Additionally, I noticed that for the sharpened images, I had to decrease the image quality to 75 to get them under 300kb. Is there a way to track how large the file size will be and compensate for this so I can avoid having to use the web optimizer? Didn't see how to do this while trying to explore the image editor.

Thanks for any feedback, and MANY thanks to everyone who has helped me get this far. After I get a rudimentary grasp of how to get some pics, I intend to write a more thorough thank you, as well as a run down of costs, etc.

You caught me! I noticed after I'd uploaded these pics that the camera had tilted slightly. When using the helicoid to focus, I'd accidentally knocked it a little off. Whoops.

The editing program I'm using is Digital Photo Professional 4, the software from the Canon website.

I took a few more pics of the same coin with a little different lighting, and I hope better focus. Because the source files are so huge (5-7Mb seems typical), it takes a long time to upload them via my cell phone connection to the optimizer. If I can optimize the pics down to under 300kb without having to run them through the web optimizer, that would be great. Can I do this with DPP?

Okay, so these were taken with different lighting, plus I tried to make sure the camera was square to get everything in better focus. I played with the level of sharpness, and decided I liked 1.3, but I hope you'll share your opinion regarding how that turned out.

Also, when saving the file, I resized down to 1000x1000 which dramatically reduced the file size without even playing with that image quality slider. Still had to put it through the web optimizer, but it's a much faster process now, only uploading ~1.4Mb files to be compressed.

Well, without further ado, here are some more trials of the same coin.

~Thank you~

After finally receiving all the components and getting to experiment with them a bit, I'd like to express my gratitude to everyone who participated in building this thread. I'm quite certain I'd never have been able to find my way without all the information, help, and encouragement everyone has provided.

For those who feel overwhelmed (like I did) by the idea of building this photography setup, and whose brains experience much of the preceding discourse like some foreign language, I encourage you to stick with it. I was seriously concerned that I would lack the affinity needed to effectively operate photo equipment and software so totally unfamiliar to me. Heck, I was often nervous that I was unintentionally buying the wrong items. But with the generous support (i.e. hand-holding) of especially Andy and Ray, I'm now able to share what I consider to be rather nice pictures. And although this thread was started several years ago now, I still came in under $400, which I plan to detail in a separate post.

A special extra thank you belongs to Ray -- sine qua non. We may not truly be able to fully appreciate what you've shared with us. Thank you so much.

Ah, you're right, of course. A little rotated. I will see if I can edit the original so I don't have to take a new pic.

I can hardly believe that I can take pictures of this quality already. Here is the fixed reverse.

Amazing photos well done :) Are you raising the coin up on a bit of cork or downling? I highly recommend it as it focusses the coin and gives a lovely blurred background.

Your photos look spot on to me. I usually sharpen about 30 percent and contrast about 6 and brightness 2, on the Canon editing software. But it depends entirely on the amount of lighting, daylight and coin! I find it hard to capture mint state shillings, so I'm working on those. But for old silver coins that are a little bit worn, this setup works incredibly well for me !