A Few Questions From An Extreme Beginner Please.

Ed...use the max zoom you can to try and frame the full coin in the viewfinder. Use all the MP you have available. Start at about f4, ISO 100, and let the shutter speed vary to get proper exposure. Post a shot and we'll help with determining what to do to fix any problems...Ray

Ed...first, turn the coin so that IN GOD WE TRUST is horizontal. Second, increase your shutter speed as you are over-exposed. You want the peak exposure values to be near the center of the histogram. After that, send us an un-cropped picture, as it's hard to tell how much cropping you've done. Here's your pic with the levels adjusted so that the histogram peak is nearer to the center:

Ed...your camera may have histograms but the editing program you use very likely has them. Another thing to do when you take the shot is to slightly under-expose. Are you doing manual mode? I recommend aperture priority, which lets the camera decide the shutter speed to achieve proper exposure. But the metering will drive exposure so that the brightest highlights will be full-scale, and that's often a problem. If you can set the camera for Aperture Priority (A mode or may Av mode) and also set the Exposure Value about -.33 or -0.5Ev, you will mostly avoid over-exposing the highlights. I'm not sure if your camera has these modes, you'll need to check. If not, then you'll just need to set camera on Manual and then take a sequence of shots with different shutter speeds, and pick the best one based on evaluations with your software...Ray

I'm expecting the best shot will be the one with the highest magnification, as long as the focus is good. That said, it's hard to tell since the images are not full-size so we can't look at them in detail. So, likely the 6th from the bottom will be the best. Can you do a 100% crop and re-post the crop?

Much better from exposure viewpoint. Now just fix the focus issues and you'll be doing fine. Only critique I have is that it's more natural to have the light hit the subject in the face. It looks like you are lighting the coin mostly from around 10:00 but I don't see a corresponding 2:00, and this is making the face dark and the overall coin unbalanced...Ray

Thanks guys. Really appreciate it! You are right about the face shadow. I changed the angle of the tripod so 2 legs would fit square on the desk, and I could see the viewfinder better, which made the light come more out of 10 o'clock.....and it shows. Will have to straighten things out again.

Ray, just curious...if you had to pick a second coin out of the lot, which one would it be? If I had to pick one, it would be more like the one above the one you picked. Maybe I'm just currently biased toward a brighter looking coin and a background which looks more "black/grey" than purplish. But that's just me :-) Am also a little nervous that I won't be able to recreate exactly the one you picked, because I'll have to lower the coin a bit to focus properly. Thanks again. Ed

Ed...that's looking much better from all perspectives. Still not quite flat, though :) Is the color correct? ...Ray

What we're talking about here is White Balance. White Balance 101:

Every form of lighting has a color. You'll note that standatd incandescent lamps in your house are a bit "yellowish," fluorescent lamps are a bit whiter, sunlight is quite different, etc. This color is measured in Kelvin, the same scale used for the colors of stars (the temperature "Kelvin" is a different scale). The Kelvin scale runs from theoretical zero to 10,000. An incandescent lamp is about 2800k, the standard "Cool White" fluorescent is 4000k, and daylight at Noon is about 5500k.

Your camera has to figure this, and apply correction for the color "cast" thrown by differing-color lighting. The Z1485IS has no ability to create "Custom" white balance settings, which is a handicap. Do you have the manual for it, by the way? If not, here (.pdf):

http://resources.kodak.com/support/...G_GLB_en.pdf

So you need to use either the "Auto" setting on your camera, or one of the presets: Daylight, Tungsten (the setting for incandescent bulbs), Fluorescent or Open Shade (shade is actually, believe it or not, a higher color temperature than daylight - about 6000k). I'm guessing you're using Auto right now. Some cameras are pretty darn good on Auto, others not so much.

Here's how you tell how well you're doing, now that you've realized it isn't really as easy to decide if the coin is the right color, depicted on a computer monitor, as it is in-hand ( ): Switch to a white background for a few shots. That background is going to tell you the quality of your white balance. You're OK as long as it's pure white, or some shade of grey. If you see any "color" at all in it, your white balance is off. That degree of grey is also a rough (very rough) estimate of the quality of your exposure - the darker the grey, the more you're underexposed. But the trouble is, the more lustrous a coin is, the more "underexposed" a background needs to be for the bright coin to be properly exposed. Here's an example:



The coin itself is appropriately-exposed, but the background (which I know to be white as I shot this) is not only grey but varying in shade of grey depending on how the pattern of the lighting I chose falls on it. Your takeaway from all this is, as long as your background color is accurate, you can assume that the coin's color is accurate as well. And you're correct in thinking that how "bright" the coin is in the image (either luster or exposure) has a bearing on how the color will appear. This is a known phenomenon, and the more savvy members looking at your images in the forum will take that into account.

One last thing, while I'm going off on color and brightness: If you have not already, set your Metering to "Spot." This will force the camera to take its' exposure information from the very center of the image, where you can be sure that the coin itself will be what the camera used to determine ISO, exposure and aperture (depending on how you're telling it to operate). "Center-Weighted" is also an appropriate choice, but cameras differ in how much weight they give to the center of the image or how large that "center" is, so stick with "Spot."

One more thing.




Luster needs direct light to present. The closer you can get your lighting to a "point source," the easier you'll find it to depict luster. As a bare minimum, "standard" household light bulbs are probably the "largest" source which will depict luster. Tube fluorescents won't do such a good job. This is partly why we're such fans of the little Jansjo LED lamps (available at Ikea) around here (in addition to the fact that they're cheap ( )) - they're very small and as close to a "point source" as one can get with lighting. You can always add some diffusion to them, for those conditions when diffusion might be recommended, and I'm not getting into that end of things right now. This wall of text is bad enough.

The tradeoff for "point source" lighting is brighter and darker areas on a given coin. You can see that in my image above - the darker areas towards the rim. I personally don't consider that a bad thing - the contrast helps to emphasize the coin's luster, to me.

There. That should be enough to bore you and everybody else reading for at least one more day.