FadeToBlack, I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here, and you're probably not going to like what I have to say. I do not wish to antagonize you and don't want this to be taken as argumentative, but I have to dissuade you from this course. Here's why:
1) Personal issues. Only higher-end coins justify paid photography, obviously. A starting value of, say, $150-200 and up into the stratosphere. Would you, as the owner of a $1500 monster-toner MS66 Morgan, send your coin off to someone you don't know to shoot? Of course not. This is your highest hurdle - forming a broad-enough reputation so that personal recommendations of people known to a prospective customer will create sufficient trust for you to be accepted sight-unseen as a viable vendor. It's a cart-before-the-horse thing, and it will take you
years to create that effect, one person at a time.
2) Guarantee. Insurance won't do it; anyone can claim to have insurance. You need to be bonded, from a source reliable-enough for (again) sight-unseen trust, and you have to be able to verifiably prove that bonding via independent resources available to your customers.
3) Quality. This is the touchiest part; please don't take offense. The images I've seen you present are highly-detailed and sharply-focused, but they aren't in Todd's league. He has something I (possibly you; I don't know yet) lack: the ability to visualize how the coin
should look, and to vary his technique to most-agreeably present that coin. And that variance in necessary technique is
very broad. You've a very nice touch with lustrous Morgans, but what it takes to nail a lustrous Morgan has nothing whatsoever with what it takes to nail a Proof. Or a toner. Or gold. Or a circulated Large Cent. The range of skills is great, encompassing
very subtle variances in lighting and setup.
I've been doing this since 2005, progressively learning and shooting a
lot of images. My archive - and these are only the images I've
kept, mind - spans 50GB and over 20,000 images. And I still have a
bunch to learn about the field.
I'm not saying you can't get there; in fact, I strongly believe otherwise. What I'm saying is, you're not there yet. You're going to need coins of all shapes, sizes and finishes to achieve this, because learning something new with a customer's coin in-hand is not the right way to do things. Shoot a couple of Proofs to get my point most easily; they're unlike anything else.
4) History. Anecdote: Last January at FUN, a guy walked up to the CCF table to talk to Russ (twohawks) about his Morgans. Russ had this
glorious Morgan toner, a coin I wasn't able to do justice with the limited resources I had at hand - although I was shooting with an 18MP Canon dSLR and 100mm Macro, I lacked the axial-lighting setup and utter blackout conditions such a coin required.
Anyway, this guy whipped out a little pocketable Canon point-and-shoot, and on the first snap recorded an image of that toner so faithful, so vibrant, that I almost quit coin photography on the spot. As it turned out, the camera was Canon's highest-end P&S, and the guy holding it was John Baumgartner, proprietor of Varslab, nationally-known attributor of VAMs and Bust Halves and one of the finest photographers in the hobby.
He knew something I didn't, and it was a big-enough gap in knowledge as to be near-magic to me.
What he knew was amazingly simple: In a brightly-lit room, with no control over lighting, a small point-and-shoot with a quality internal processor is simply a better tool for imaging coins than the highest-end bespoke dSLR rig. Further, he knew enough not to worry about creating a 4000-pixel monster image; just enough of an image to present in
highly agreeable fashion online.
That one snap taught me more about coin photography than all my efforts of the previous three years, combined, after we'd talked about it.
The takeaway is this: Going forward, the need for skilled, specialized photographers such as us will be a steadily-decreasing market. This forum is proof, on a smaller scale. We're developing new techniques, teaching new photographers, and leveraging new technology as fast as we possibly can, to the detriment of specialization. There are people here taking presentation-quality images with
cellphones, fer cryin' out loud.
The things you see Ray, and myself, and CaptainFwiffo and others doing in this forum are merely self-serving. We're extending the upper limits for
fun, not necessarily for any real-world application, just because we like pushing those limits. We're working in the last few percentage points of quality, and the only way that quality has any applicability in the real world is when the photographer extends their knowledge into both the broad area of postprocessing and the narrow subspecialty of micro-imaging using a microscope objective or equivalent. The reason we're still lassoing new photographers into the dSLR-bellows-duplicating lens setup is that, for the same money as a nice P&S, one can have the full gamut of photography from full-face to microscopic detail. That cost equation will likely not change - cellphone cameras will make lower-end P&S's obsolete very soon if not already, so the cost will not be coming down. And the people we're teaching have a genuine interest, a dedication to their coins which puts them into the upper echelon of numismatists. Not everybody has that intense, detailed focus on their collection.
But for just shooting a nice image of a coin, which you can post online in gradable quality, well, that ability is going to be accessible to
anyone within the next few years. With only a little effort to maximize one's knowledge, and the willingness to purchase the right technology, that goal is already available to all.
And realistically defining the needs and desires of potential customers - especially in an atmosphere where
TPG's are already shooting security-quality images of submissions - the end is in sight for professional, archive-quality photographers.
Put bluntly, you're 5 years too late, and I feel that pursuing this course will only be an exercise in frustration for you.
Posted 10/23/2013 4:49 pm
I would imagine this will be the toughest part of the business.
