Photo Room At Heritage Auctions In Dallas

mdpm...the equipment listed in the "<$350" and <$400" threads is perfectly capable of doing all of the above, or even way better. Based on what I see at the HA site, they push their aperture down until there is a little bit of diffraction blurriness, but not enough to be annoying. They also light the coin very effectively. They also likely have a fairly complex canned/proprietary post-processing routine using PhotoShop tools. But with good lighting technique, and <$350 worth of equipment, you can do just as well.

to the Community, dal!

dal,

e ótimo ter você como membro CCF

translated 'it's great to have you as a CCF member.'

For starters it always made me feel more comfortable in non-US countries when I heard speaking or saw writing for the initial contact from a foreigner trying to communicate with me in English.

However, I always knew I would never, ever be proficient in anything but English but just the attempt made me feel that the other individual truly wanted to welcome me to their group.

We hope you continue on for many more posts going forward with CCF :)

Search around the web, several people posted photos from those tours. Some of them will still remain.

There was I remember a whole thread spawned discussing how they did it - consensus was is was for consistency and even lighting, not beauty.

Here are re-uploads of the photos I originally posted before photobucket killed all of them. Thankfully I did back up most of my PB account before they pulled the plug.

Only thing I have to add to my original post, is it sure makes it easy shooting to have presets on a station for each type of coin (copper, silver, gold) I would imagine they have also gone to the trouble of calibrating the cameras and have custom set-ups saved to improve work flow speed. They shoot an awfully large amount of coins every day.

Man that is some set up.

BTW this is not much different than the "diffusion at the lens" concept, but on a bigger scale...

dal,
The diffusers were plastic sheeting clamped to a simple frame. Nothing special about them really, one could probably use vellum paper or similar plexiglass in translucent form. I've successfully used a cut up milk carton in the past.

I would guess (was a professional photographer for over a decade) they wattage is either 500 or 1200 watts lamps, not sure the power settings used, but probably they would vary for each different station (copper, silver or gold) and depending on how close to the windows the station is at (ambient light) there was no real control of the ambient light at all in the room which surprised me. The lamps are only at power when firing the shot, you can run them at a lower level to see shadow placement. I assume they calibrated each station, camera lens setting, that would make sense as they are trying to maintain a constant equal level and lighting for each coin they shoot, with an ultimate goal of going to their website for auction and printed catalog.