Photo Coins For Publication. I Need Help.

As a professional photographer for a long time, my advice is to hire someone to shoot for you. Write the book, you can use your own basic point and shoot digital images, as placeholders, if your publishing the book, the publisher will more than likely have a staff photographer or one that they use on projects.

That is also what most publishers will tell you. Unless you already have the skills and necessary talent to make publication ready prints.

Publication ready prints, are color balanced, white balanced, cropped, enlarged, basically ready to go to press. When I shot for magazines the files had to be on a CD @ 300dpi TIF uncompressed, I was doing this during the transition to digital from film, should be the same today. Of course it will depend on the publication type, newsprint, paper stock, on-line, DVD, etc.

I shot sports and concerts not macro stuff, but sharpness (focus) and composition is key. In Macro it would be vivid color, focus, sharpness. Your exposure should be spot on, as with macro shooting you control the lighting.

I know JT Stanton Press uses Bill Fivaz for most of their coin photography, if you can't match what the Cherrypicker's Guides show in details or basic Heritage Auction Catalogs for whole coin shots - then you're not publication ready!

Not trying to say you can't do it, but us photographers always wonder why people never want to pay us for our work, or trade it for "exposure" in publications. Can't tell you how many jobs I turned down over that. A good photographer should work up a contract that would include the rights to use the photos in your book and website, but will probably want to retain the © on the original image. Bill Fivaz has shot so many coins he may have already shot in his archives exactly what you need, so he'd be the first guy I contacted if I was self - publishing a book, otherwise speak to your editor and publisher, they will know where to go in your case.

Excellent stuff WestCoin. The perspective of a professional in the field is always appreciated.

Reasons to do your own photography:
- you are not satisfied with what is available
- you're looking for some special "angle" to the photos
- you want to take photos of a wide range of your own coins
- etc

You will NOT save any money or time by doing it yourself, so you would need a strong reason to take the time and incur the expense of DIY...Ray

Another excellent book is "The Art of Coins and their Photography" by Gerald Hoberman. About 1/3 of the book is coin history, 1/3 excellent photos, and 1/3 coin photography.