Best I Can Get On A $400 Budget? Help

Reading this thread and thinking back to my College physics class (1 day of optics) and some of the other stuff floating around and I've figured out what Ray is leading us to!

The P&S world is all about taking the decisions (other than PTB - Push The Button) away from the photographer. Sure some of them have zoom controls, but mostly that's it - PTB, camera reads the scene, decides the aperture and exposure, focuses the lens for maximum sharpness at some specific point or points and SNAP.

Newer ones come with 20-picture burst modes (pick the one where everyone's eyes are open), face recog (camera waits until eyes are open), etc. Dog/Cat mode to avoid green eye, etc. Still PTB.

Even the prosumer cameras have automatic modes and studies show MOST users never use anything else. Better lens, sometimes a better/faster computer chip making the decisions, better sensor. Still PTB.


The problem is that everything you are trying to do to photograph a coin goes against the automation. The only points with enough definition for autofocus are the rim to the background. With small depth of field (the distance from the lens to the object that's actually sharp), then you may have a sharp rim and a blurry field of the coin. Same kinds of problems exist with the highly reflective surface of the coin which breaks the auto-exposure expectations about areas of dark and light across the whole image.

I also figured out why Ray is recommending duplicating/enlarger lenses... because they are optimized to do one thing and one thing only - take a flat image (the negative) and project it onto a flat surface (the photo paper) with absolute sharpness at that one constant distance. If, 1mm away from that distance the image is blurry it doesn't matter. Here we are doing the inverse (flat object to flat sensor), but the lens works fine in reverse (that's basic optics). And while that's WRONG WRONG WRONG for normal photography - it's exactly what we want for coin photography!

But almost nobody does photo darkroom anymore, so what used to be a $500 top of the line enlarger lens is now selling for firesale prices. And if most of the camera modes aren't of any use for our purposes, why pay for them? (Unless you are also planning to use the same camera body for normal photography)

Remember, you are giving up all the automation. Manual setup, manual focus, maybe even manual exposure.

Then they are going to lead us to setting the white balance (that's how you tell the camera what is truly white so it knows how to map the charge in the wells of the CCD into colors in the photo) (most cameras are designed for an average 18% grey - good for my grey cat, not so good for a DMPL coin). Not sure what comes next.

-----Burton

Don't go anywhere you guys, I'm scared lol and most likely will need you to answer more dumb questions.

Im so glad I'm a custom cabinet maker and not a photographer, So much easier designing and building kitchens than taking picture lol

Those are exactly right. It's particularly cool that you found the RMS adapter along with the EOS adapter in one auction! So you only need the first 3.

For extensions, here is an example:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Macro-Exten...em484c6fdfc7

Here's a 75mm EL-Nikkor for a near EL-Cheapo price:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Nikon-EL-Ni...em4ac641ba12

Here's a Nikon M5:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/NIKON-p-M-5...em2c71eeaa03

For the extensions, just do a search for "M42 extension" on ebay Canada and you should get a bunch of hits.

For the objective, you could go super cheap and buy one of the 4x Tech Instruments objectives. I have one of these and while not as good as the Nikon (what else is?) it does a decent job and will get you started while you figure out how to use the setup and search for a better lens. For $5, shipping worldwide, how can you go wrong?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Technical-I...em4612cb12be

You're on your way to an excellent rig. The EL-Nikkor is probably the very best of the el-cheapo duplicating lenses, and it's going to be a revelation for you. As regards an extension set, all you need is that M42 identification (so you get the correct thread) and the total extension length; the focusing helicoil will add some of tha length on its' own as well. The purpose of these extensions are to vary the magnification available to you; the further away from the camera you can position the lens, the greater the magnification, so you'll be switching them in and out, adding and subtracting length, depending on what you're shooting and how big you want the image on your sensor. This stuff is of a quality such that you're going to want to fill as much of the camera's sensor with the coin as you can, every time.

Now, while you're waiting for things to arrive, browse this forum for threads where we've been discussing what we do with these wonderful toys. Look for things authored by Ray and relevant thread titles. We will, of course, be happy to help with your specific questions as well. It's time for you to get grounded in the basics of aperture, exposure, ISO and White Balance. You won't need to become a guru, but you need to get a feel for how these things interrelate and affect your final image.

Burton, you've hit the nail on the head. The demise of darkroom photography has led to a glut of really nice optics on the market for a low price, lenses ideally suited to what we want to do with them. Further, P&S cameras, even prosumer ones, have lenses which represent major compromises due to zoom and small sensor sizes. You (and rmc) should find that at an appropriate aperture (f/8's a good starting choice), one of these lenses will provide sufficient depth of field to get a whole coin sharply-focused onto the sensor in one shot with no need to z-stack.

Rmc, the EL-Nikkor will serve all of your needs for whole-coin photography, and you'll probably be surprised at just how large a detail image you can create using it and a little extra magnification, in conjunction with the magnification your camera's sensor adds by definition. Point being: I have a large, high-resolution monitor - 27" and 2560x1440 pixels. The rig you're putting together will create sharp images which, observed at full size, will only show half the coin at once on my big monitor.

That's the key to what we're doing here. When an image is that sharp, that big, by the time you downsize it for forum presentation it will end up something people will gush about. And 100% crops (chunks of the original-size image) will likely suffice to show most mint errors in sharp detail. The microscope objective is for showing single grains of sand at the size of a boulder.

Awesome thread.

Just do an ebay search for "M42 Adapter" and patronize one of the Chinese/Hong Kong sellers who offer sets for less than $5 shipped. You'll run into a couple of sellers with ridiculous Feedback counts - six-figure sales numbers - earned selling little stuff like this. I patronize them regularly for cellphone batteries, cables, adapters and the like. Most of them ship worldwide, but some have exclusion lists so look thoroughly. For instance:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Macro-Exten...em53f8a2afb2