El-Cheapo Lenses

Personally I suggest getting 3 lights since you occasionally need a 3rd for fill-in lighting. 3 lights will fit in a medium flat rate box...Ray

Tom...you did great on that lens! Good price, looks like a clean lens and I've done business with brooklyncamera before with great results. 80mm is a safe bet for the whole range of coin sizes with your Canon bellows. Your list looks pretty complete, and should get you started. A warning, though...you will spend much more time learning how to set up your lights than any other activity! Just keep it in mind, lighting is the single biggest learning curve. I recommend the Jansjo lights because they are small and easy to move around with their goosenecks, and run reasonably cool so you can do a lot with diffusers, etc to get lighting where and how you like.

Next step is to decide on how you want to do higher mag shots. Your 80mm will go up to about 1.5-2x mag on the Canon bellows. If you need higher, you will need a shorter focal length lens or a microscope objective. A Nikon 50mm is a good choice if you want to keep with the same adapters, etc. You can probably get to about 4x or so with the 50mm. If you want to go farther, you will need a 35mm or shorter lens. What are you looking to achieve?

Tom...It's probably best at this point to stick with what you have purchased already and learn it's use and limitations. The 80mm lens can achieve possibly 1.5x or maybe 2x magnification and you can get "artificial magnification" with cropping. For software, I use Canon's DPP for setting initial levels and doing the RAW-JPG conversions, then I crop and set final levels and sharpness in Nikon ViewNX2. If I need to join photos, place arrows, do circular crops, etc I've used an old version of PaintShop Pro shareware since Win95 days. I don't like paying for software...Ray

Those are the lights, although the truly...golly, I can't use that word here...."discerning" photographer will use the black models to minimize the chance of reflected light.

Then again, I can't disconnect myself from the ranks of....that word I can't use....so I could be just over the top.

I don't really think it matters, truth be told.

The 80mm lens was delivered today .. but not the adapters.

First impression was .. wow .. looks in good shape ..
but wow .. it looks small in size





Still looking at Jansjo lights .. last night was looking at Amazon ... but never ordered from them. Might just order them from ebay tonight.

Here's a great deal on an EL-Omegar lens (which I believe are made by Rodenstock, but please double-check before buying).

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...B:SS:US:1123