Pushing The Limits Of My Cameraphone

Nice pictures, your set up sounds a lot like mine.

Photos are very good considering. Could use a little more light though.
John1

You're doing this with an OG Droid? You are my hero.

Here's my fancy photography equipment. It's a very cheap loupe (I got a set of 3 different ones for $6.50 on Amazon). I make liberal use of tape in my efforts, but primarily to attach the loupe securely in front of the lens of my camera-phone.



My light source - a lamp that I had lying around.



The key is the shape of the light source. I use a piece of paper to diffuse the light, combined with a mask made of masking tape and aluminum foil.





It works like rpmsrpms's smile directors. I actually have a couple Janjso lights, and could make smile directors, but I can't have a longer exposure (even if the phone would do it, I wouldn't be able to hold it steady enough). The circular disc in the center makes it like a ring light, so that the shadow falls on the coin, thereby preventing glare on the slab. The cross-shaped part turns it into segments of a ring light so that it can show luster and color at the same time.

Here's what it looks like before I do cropping and processing:



It's tricky, because I have to have my camera just a few inches above the slab, so it is between the light and the coin. To prevent myself from completely blocking the light, I am shooting at a bit of an angle, so only part of the coin is in focus. You can see the shadow of my hand and the phone in the lower part of the picture (part of why the bottom of my coins end up dark), and a reflection of the loupe.

It took a lot of fine tuning of the mask, the distance between the coin and light source, and constant fine tuning (since the lamp sorta floats around and sinks into the carpet).

A few coins are giving me a lot more trouble because their slabs are more scuffed, making it hard for the camera to focus and creating distractions. My '44-D and '41-S seem to confuse the auto-focus because they're semi-prooflike, so I haven't gotten satisfying pictures of those yet.

It takes some degree of Photoshop sophistication to get the photos in shape. The white-balance and exposure is more or less randomly selected by the camera, so I have to correct for that. The white insert in NGC slabs is helpful for that.

Hey Captain,

Thanks for showing me the setup, save me a lot of time. Now I just need to do similar things over the weekend.

That's a good idea, but probably more fiddly than I'd be able to manage, considering I'm using scotch tape to attach the loupe to the phone and it's all hand-held (making the results not very reproducible). I seem to do OK if I just back off a little and take several pictures from slightly different positions and keeping the best one. The reverse of the 1937-D, for instance, has almost no DOF problem.

My instinct is to try to cram the camera as close as possible to use as much of the sensor as possible, but it really works against me. The distortion/blurring away from the center of the field is really bad with the jury-rigged optics (I was really close on that '42-D and I never got the right side of the coin sharp, I think there's even noticeable barrel distortion). I get a more uniformly sharp image and better lighting from a bit further away even though I'm wasting pixels.

I can picture the ultimate light source, a hemispherical, geodesic dome made up of small OLED panels, each of which can be turned on or off individually with some sort of computer control, with a hatch in the top through which you plunge your lens. You could fine tune the shape of the light source to each individual coin.

Impressive. That trumps what I am getting with a 12MP digital camera