I Think I Found My Best Setup For Iphonography

And you're doing this with a cellphone. Ludicrous.

I read this awesome thread in a hotel room on a business trip. I have pretty much never taken a good photo of a coin, and thought I would see what I could do with an iPhone, a piece of paper, and a lamp for light. I took this pic of a nickel I found in change. I am very pleased.

No where near as good as your photos, but I finally have hope . Thank you!

OK, so I received 3 IKEA Jansjo lamps in the mail yesterday, and I got busy experimenting again with coin photography. More specifically, I'm now experimenting with DIRECT lighting. I took the lamp out of the Sanoto lightbox. The problem I had before was that when I would try to capture an image, the shadow of the phone was impossible to eliminate because it was in the direct path of the fixed lamp. With these new Jansjo lamps, that problem is eliminated.

At first I tried direct light without diffusion. Here are the results:





The images aren't horrible, but the direct light is just too much, creating harsh contrasts even though the luster is brought out quite nicely. I then tried diffusing the lights slightly with tissue paper, just as Canadian Banknotes had done. Here are the results after diffusion:





This my first attempt at what I hope will become my permanent iphonography setup. The light box no longer has a light tube. It now serves perfectly as an enclosed area for photographing coins. Here is what the setup looks like now:





I have to say that out of everything I have tried up to this point, using the diffusion technique with Jansjo lamps has produced the most accurate image in terms of color and clarity. I'm pretty happy with this result. Now to see if I can tweak the technique a bit. Thoughts?

Thank you for pointing that out, CB! I didn't really notice that until you pointed it out, and I think that may be the reason why I'm not capturing the luster as well. I hope I can add some more luster to the image with a little bit of light adjustment. I'll try again tomorrow night. I callin' it a night.

O crap- just realized it's daylight savings time!

I assume you're referring to the setup photos? What you're seeing on the phone is the zoomed-in image of the Morgan.

Thanks, SD. I'm glad I discovered this aspect of the hobby. It's just that much more to enjoy about it.

I too am curious how copper will perform with this setup. I will try to find a good Lincoln Cent to test out. maybe later tonight I can get to it. Stay tuned. . . .

OK- I just did some slight adjustments to the Jansjo lamp positions, and the improvement is quite impressive. The contrast is not as harsh now.