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Posted 03/08/2013 6:48 pm
Agent Mulder, please try my VOTIVE TRICK. It works like this:
--Take an old glass holder from a votive candle (a juice glass works too if you have one with straight, unpatterned sides, but that's pretty rare) and clean it VERY WELL. I mean hot water, soap, rinse rinse RINSE, then splash the inside with rubbing alcohol and leave it to air dry.
--Line the SIDES of the votive holder with white copy paper. Take a small square of the paper (the size of a dime will work perfectly) and lay it in the bottom of the holder. DON'T TAPE IT DOWN.
--Put the coin to be photographed in the votive holder and rotate the holder until the coin is in the position you want. Make sure the square of white paper is visible somewhere in the vicinity of the coin (doesn't need to be right under it and I personally find it's better if it's not).
--Lay your camera on top of the holder, facing down into it, in any kind of light--I've used this trick with fluorescents (great results!), natural daylight (trickier), and a really crummy incandescent bulb (which, well . . . my pictures were clear, anyway). Your only concern is that the light is close enough to the votive holder that it will shine through the copy paper in some way (light from directly above will, of course, produce a shadow from the camera).
--Snap away!
--Next, put your photos into GIMP* and crop them down to where you want them BUT MAKE SURE THE SQUARE OF WHITE STILL SHOWS. Before sizing down--unless you need to do so part of the way to make the whole photo visible to you--go into the Color menu, select LEVELS, and click on the little eyedropper that's dipping into a pool of white. This will make your icon into an eyedropper. Use it to select your white square of paper.
--Accept, size down, and you're done!
With very few exceptions, this method has always worked for me (later, when I got better at photographing through flips, I would leave the edges of the flip in frame and use the white cardboard for the colour correction--same concept).
Moving on, I grew up in, um, let's use the politest understatement possible and say a "troubled household." I learned early to ask if I could ask a question because I never knew when the answer was going to be "NO!" and some shouting to get out of the room. To this day I still find myself doing that and sometimes apologising for asking a question in a manner that one of my college professors called a "verbal tic," as in "Nina, why do you end every question with the word 'sorry'? Every single one, it sounds like a verbal tic." ("Do you have directions to the post office? Sorry.") I'm sure I'm not the only one.
*this is the program I use, so this is the one I'll be discussing. If you have Photoshop or PaintProPlus, it should have a similar feature to the one I use.
--Take an old glass holder from a votive candle (a juice glass works too if you have one with straight, unpatterned sides, but that's pretty rare) and clean it VERY WELL. I mean hot water, soap, rinse rinse RINSE, then splash the inside with rubbing alcohol and leave it to air dry.
--Line the SIDES of the votive holder with white copy paper. Take a small square of the paper (the size of a dime will work perfectly) and lay it in the bottom of the holder. DON'T TAPE IT DOWN.
--Put the coin to be photographed in the votive holder and rotate the holder until the coin is in the position you want. Make sure the square of white paper is visible somewhere in the vicinity of the coin (doesn't need to be right under it and I personally find it's better if it's not).
--Lay your camera on top of the holder, facing down into it, in any kind of light--I've used this trick with fluorescents (great results!), natural daylight (trickier), and a really crummy incandescent bulb (which, well . . . my pictures were clear, anyway). Your only concern is that the light is close enough to the votive holder that it will shine through the copy paper in some way (light from directly above will, of course, produce a shadow from the camera).
--Snap away!
--Next, put your photos into GIMP* and crop them down to where you want them BUT MAKE SURE THE SQUARE OF WHITE STILL SHOWS. Before sizing down--unless you need to do so part of the way to make the whole photo visible to you--go into the Color menu, select LEVELS, and click on the little eyedropper that's dipping into a pool of white. This will make your icon into an eyedropper. Use it to select your white square of paper.
--Accept, size down, and you're done!
With very few exceptions, this method has always worked for me (later, when I got better at photographing through flips, I would leave the edges of the flip in frame and use the white cardboard for the colour correction--same concept).
Moving on, I grew up in, um, let's use the politest understatement possible and say a "troubled household." I learned early to ask if I could ask a question because I never knew when the answer was going to be "NO!" and some shouting to get out of the room. To this day I still find myself doing that and sometimes apologising for asking a question in a manner that one of my college professors called a "verbal tic," as in "Nina, why do you end every question with the word 'sorry'? Every single one, it sounds like a verbal tic." ("Do you have directions to the post office? Sorry.") I'm sure I'm not the only one.
*this is the program I use, so this is the one I'll be discussing. If you have Photoshop or PaintProPlus, it should have a similar feature to the one I use.
