I Have Joined The Dark, I Mean, Bellows Side

I'm anxious to see some of your work. What camera are you going to use? I think you have a good choiced in bellows and lens. You will have the best people helping you here!

You made a good choice with the 75ELN. It's a good lens from 0.4:1 (Dollars) up to 2:1 (variety shots) without having to reverse it. I assume you've seen Mark Goodman's test results for this lens, but if not you can see them here:

http://coinimaging.com/nikon75.html

I wish I could say I was further along in my conversion to a bellows setup. The Pentax Auto Bellows arrived, and is like-new. No cracked bearings or even surface wear. Very solid piece of machinery. Sadly, I ran into what others have discovered when trying to mount some Canon DSLRs using an m42-EOS adapter: The base of the bellows' camera mount interferes slightly with the base of the camera, meaning I'll need a thin extension tube to properly secure the camera (or grind a bit of metal off the bellows).

At the other end of the bellows, my m39-m42 adapter has not arrived, but my first lens for bellows use has. I went with a Schneider Componon-S 80/4. The lens arrived yesterday and looks great! Too bad I can't mount it yet. Hopefully I'll have something to show sooner than later.

Oh, that's just lovely.

Spent some time shooting whole dollars to get this one. I think it needs some 6 o'clock fill lighting to help even out the exposure and also to show the top denticles better. I guess I'll have to pick up a third light since adding a reflector isn't adding enough additional light. The coin is a 1939 Canada 1 Dollar, and it's a single image shot, with 2 steep-angle diffused LED lights at about 10:30 and 1:30.

Thanks very much, Ham!

Hi Ray, and thanks; it means a lot.

You probably guessed my workflow already, with regard to levels. There isn't any! Here is basically what I did for the dollar shot:

1. Position coin / dial in magnification
2. Focus
3. Position Lights
4. Capture
5. Repeat 3 and 4 for 2 hours until satisfied
6. Crop to 1:1
7. Export (Resize Image/Limit Filesize/Save)

Part of the reason for the lighting taking so long is that I don't have Jansjos, or any lamps with both a flexible neck and fixed base. Instead my current pair of lights are flexible LED work lights you'd by at a hardware store diffused with parchment paper. I haven't converted them yet for use with an AC adapter, so they're each running on 3 AA batteries. I'll take a photo of my (cumbersome) setup to add to this thread soon.

It seems to me that once you have a reasonable setup that achieves proper magnification, focus, and alignment, the quality of the image is most sensitive to aspects of lighting, such as position. Since I get hung up here a lot I don't usually get to the point where post-processing can have a significant (and positive) impact on the image. As my setup evolves into something with which I can more consistently produce good results, I think I'll really come to appreciate what can be done in post-processing. I would say your post-processed image is a strict improvement to my original, and that was done using only the exported jpg, not the raw cr2!

3 small comments, Laureate Bust:

1) Switch Steps 2 & 3, or refocus after lighting if you're not.

2) Switch to Spot metering.

2) Depending on your degree of paranoia, learn about EXIF data and how to exclude it from images you post online. This process will differ depending on what software you're using, and will have the additional advantage of making your files smaller.