New Coin Photography Setup - Thoughts?

Having a bellows setup actually makes it easier to make the camera work double-duty. If you use a copy stand or tripod, it is the camera mount itself that determines alignment to the coin. If you use bellows, then the bellows mounts to the copy stand or tripod, and alignment just needs to be done once. After that, the camera can be easily removed from the bellows and walkaround lens installed for portraits/flowers/bugs. Once the family photos are done, just remove the walkaround lens and reinstall camera to the bellows and pick up where you left off.

I'm not sure how convenient it would be to store the bellows set up. As it stands now I can easily disassemble my copy stand and slide it anywhere out of sight. My lens goes in a bag with the rest of my equipment and is put away. This is something my wife likes. Plus, I only need one macro system as opposed to two. I know I'm loosing a bit of functionality and close up focusing, but I am already missing a lot of that using a Nikon with digicamcontrol (manual focus is near impossible using live view on a computer screen)

I was able to find a used 85mm Nikon lens for a great deal, though initially I was leaning heavily to the Tamron 90mm. If I don't like the Nikon, I can easily sell it for what I paid and get the Tamron. The Tokina and Sigma's I looked at didn't autofocus on the d3300 so I didn't even consider them. If the live view on the computer screen was better I wouldn't have minded manual only, but that just isn't the case for me.

ssuperddave I think having all this information in this thread (and others) is great. If someone looking to dive into more advanced coin photography methods stumbles upon this and other threads a lot of options are going to be present for them to consider. The more devils advocate playing you do here, the more knowledge will be available for the next person! It needn't be one sided!

Also, one thing I noticed shopping for the Tamron 90mm, was that a lot of stores still carry the older version with the extending focus tube, which would be a terrible choice for coin photography, as it would likely get in the way of lighting. Tamron has a newer one, but either photos aren't updated on sellers stores, or they aren't as available, I don't know. The newer one acts like the Nikon 85mm where the focusing is all internal.

New lens, new trials. Small coins this time, Half Dimes that didn't come close to filling the sensor with the kit lens now can completely fill the sensor. First up is a Morgan I had laying around. Lens is a Nikon 85mm micro (macro)



Ran into trouble with one of my nearly proof like Half Dimes. I tried diffusing my lights to not much success. Is axial lighting my next step? Any thoughts on improving the 1860? The amount of noise/CA in the 1860 compared to the 1842 is quite noticeable.

f/8 ISO 200





100% crop comparison at the dates

Dar, for 100% crop you just view the image at 100% of its size in your editing program and then crop what you want to post. So basically you go to view or zoom and select 100%. At this point depending on your resolution the image is huge on the screen and that is 100%. Then you crop the portion you want to showcase. I did the dates. Hope this makes sense.

The term "100% crop" means only that you did not downsize what you're showing onscreen at all; it's as large as it came out of the camera.

If you're taking photos of coins in slabs I can't give you much advice: haven't really tried that, but I think the reflection on the slab itself makes it harder to take good photos.
If the photos are not in a slab, I think axial lighting is the way to go. In my setup I use a piece of glass from a cheap photo frame on a 45 degree angle. For light I have used a simple cheap bedstand with considerable succes, but that required a lot of playing around with the white balance settings. I now have a flash gun that I use (Nikon SB-700). These can be used as a slave, where the pop-up flash works as the trigger. To prevent the light from the pop-up flash from illuminating the coin I use a piece of plastic Nikon sells that lets only the infra-red light through (which is used for the trigger). The flashgun I position next to the glass. I use a diffuser as well, brand Kleenex. Just a tissue seems to be a very effective diffuser!

The results (camera: Nikon D5200, lens Sigma 105 mm macro)