First Shots With My Well Over $350 Setup... Updated :)

Can I assume you're leaving all this expensive lighting in the box when shooting coins? It's totally incompatible with Job One of coin imaging, which is to get the coin and the lens completely parallel. That's almost impossible with the camera horizontal.

Fair enough. Guessing you're not standing the coin perfectly on edge - tough, from a balance standpoint - the usual pro-tip for making lens and coin parallel applies: set a pocket mirror at the same angle the coin will tilt, and then adjust the camera so you see the lens centered in the viewfinder. Instant square on all axes. Of course, the fact that your images are not only perfectly cropped, but perfectly square, indicates you've got an idea how to get this done already.

Now that I've seen the setup, I'm pondering how you might get the lighting up to a higher angle. The Portalites are huge, and diffuse over a pretty wide angle. I'd actually suggest using just one of them, and place it behind the camera, with wide axis horizontal. This will do a couple things for you:

1) Greatly reduce the total diffusion angle, possibly improving luster presentation
2) Raise the effective angle vs "horizontal" of your lights

It may be best to obscure the center portion of the Portalite to split it effectively into two sources. I do that with diffusers now, but on a smaller scale, and it allows me to use just a single Jansjo for coins(!!).

By the way, is that a black cat under the Portalite in middle picture? I see just a pair of green feline eyes...

Ray

Ray, my light poles reach a height of 9 Feet so I can reposition the lights just about any way. I have loads of experimenting to do.... I think what you're seeing is one of my camera bags... not a black cat...

I suspect the lights may make you a bit with lustrous silver; try something like that if you have one in stock to find out early.

Never having worked with a lighting setup like yours, I'm unsure how to advise. You're losing contrast and sharpness which your equipment is certainly capable of providing; my general advice for that situation is "less diffusion," but I don't know how that applies here. And keep in mind, even lustrous nickel is a bit more "matte" than silver, so this is yet another category of lighting headache.

You're absolutely right.

I'm still not liking what I see regarding lighting angles. Take your Morgan obverse as example...the face is dark, but edges of devices around face are bright. This is opposite what you should be targeting. Many folks talk about the "in-hand look" as being the holy grail, and it's actually a pet peeve of mine, but I will invoke it here. Pick up that Morgan and view it like you would at a coin show or at home, with a single light. What angle is the light versus the coin? Most folks hold a slabbed coin such that the light is virtually glaring off the slab surface, or a bit off from that. That's about 75-80 degrees. If you do the same, then you should be trying to get your lights to make your coin look like that. You might also purposefully hold the coin such that the light is 45-deg from horizontal. You will get little surface reflection, and the edges of the device will be bright, just like in your photo. I bet you will prefer the higher-angle position.