Collecting Idea, Not Sure If It's New.

In a hobby which prides itself on esoteric specialization, I believe you have just trumped us all.

You realize, of course, that for less than the price of some of these coins you can set yourself up with a rig easily capable of duplicating PCGS' imaging results....

That's funny, yeah I certainly could. I've never been very good at taking pictures though I must admit. If anything it makes for a good hunt to work on obtaining some of these coins. I've slowly started creating a spreadsheet with hyperlinks to images of coins I'd love to own. This process is giving me an opportunity to view a huge number of vary beautiful coins, which is something I love to do.

For now I'm limiting it to coins from the 19th century, and starting with Seated Liberty coinage as that's my passion at the moment.

Here's what I've logged so far
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u...%20links.xls

enjoy

of course the camera costs extra

http://www.clouddome.com/

the one that costs less than tanks of gas for a month ;-)

basic original cloud dome

i just ordered two days ago after it was presented to me by the person that took the pic of the 1852 I showed
i couldnt believe it

i am going to not buy coins for a month a just concentrate on photographing everything I have

I'm stoked

i think you will be as well

In all honesty, I strongly disagree with that as an appropriate way of lighting/photographing coins. It destroys contrast, and quite frankly I think dsfreeworld's images would look even better from the same camera with somewhat more direct lighting. The fact that it's creating images of this quality with totally diffused light is a strong point in that camera's favor.

Case in point: Way back when I was first learning to image coins, I was using a Minolta Z2, a 4MP superzoom. It was what I had. I rigged up a couple 120w R40 floodlights, turned on every light in the bathroom along with them pointed at the walls and let reflected light define the shot. This was a typical result:



Not awful, and I think what contrast I achieved was due to the distance of the coin from any light source, reflected or not. Then I tried various types of direct lighting, and the camera immediately started providing stuff like this:






Needless to say, I abandoned indirect lighting and haven't gone back since.

A number of things discussed in this thread already and I guess there were a couple of points of discussion that I brought up in the OP. My main reason for posting this thread though was not so much about the photography, but to bring up the idea of creating another collecting goal. One of hunting to find the coins that were featured within the CoinFacts pages. In truth about half of the coins I posted above ended up being featured coins purely by accident. I didn't actually seek them out because they were on CoinFacts. Then purely by accident it got me thinking why not search these coins out and several of the other coins I obtained through these searches. It's a kind of a treasure hunt of sorts.

Now I'm not suggesting that I'd purchase a coin simply because it was featured but if it was a coin that I truly admired then I'd consider it a target. With the cost of most of these coins I suppose it would likely be a life long quest... All the better.

Anyway, just a collecting idea I'm trying out and thought I'd share. I'll post more coins in this thread if I acquire more that are featured and I'd encourage anyone else that already owns PCGS coins that are currently featured on CoinFacts or acquires any in the future to post here in this thread.

If it catches on I'd just change the name of the thread to something more appropriate. It it doesn't catch on then oh well.

Cheers.

The Heritage Auctions at the Long Beach Show had a lot of very nice coins this year. In the end I only ended up picking up one coin but I like it a lot. And it happens to fit my new goofy collecting idea. It's a PCGS featured coin and CAC approved to boot.