Canon T1i & Bellows GSA Dollars

Great thread!

Ham...exactly what I was looking for. As you can see, going from "high" to "low" angle makes a huge difference in appearance of the coin. The high angle puts more light onto the coin and less on the holder, but doesn't show the luster as well. It's there, but it's starting to "spread out" rather than appearing in sharp bands. If you were at true 90-deg, the luster bands would spread evenly across the whole coin and thus disappear altogether! The low angle puts more light onto surface reflections and details, and shows the narrowest luster bands and the most surface detail, which is not always flattering.

Note that brightest luster band shows up on the 75-deg shot, but you've lost a lot of the subtle shadow detail around the devices by 75-deg. I would personally recommend you to find an angle between your 90-deg and 75-deg shots that narrows-up the luster bands a little but still maintains the shadow detail as much as possible. Subtle changes of a couple of degrees make a big difference! Once you have an angle that gives you what you are looking for, then add another light and try moving the two around to optimize the overall light vs shadow tradeoff.

To add to that, you'll notice that the highest angles that you start getting glare on the holder (there's always a trade-off). If you want to use high-angle lighting, but want to avoid the glare, you'll want to look into Ray's smile directors.

Ray, I think you could package and sell smile direction kits. I imagine people calling into the support line and can hear the operator in my head - "Thank you for calling Smile Industries - how may I direct your smile?"

The contrast in your images seems to vary quite a bit, so I'm wondering where in the workflow that is happening. Basically, your black level is too high sometimes, which makes the image washed out and less punchy. I don't think it's really an exposure problem because it's not like your highlights are getting blown way out.

For consistency, I would stick with a single ISO and aperture setting while experimenting to minimize the variables. No reason not to use ISO 100 and go for minimum noise since you're on a fixed stand. Not sure what lens it is, but you may want to open it up wider than f/8; supposedly a notch or two down from the widest setting gets the best performance on most lenses. Then put the camera in Av mode and let the metering determine the shutter speed.

One more thing, I did a custom white balance before the last shot.

One more shot for today. I left this one alone--no PP. I'm not familiar with how to add brightness, contrast, sharpness, etc. I think that is another reason why the examples vary so much. When processing, where do you start?

Ham, what software are you using to process the images? Anything? Are you shooting JPEGs or RAW?

Sorry, part of the post of left off. I used (4) Jansjo's at 10, 2, 4, & 6 o'clock roughly.