Extreme Macro Coin Photography

It's hard to answer the question. The view on the screen seems to look in focus, but my mind might be tricking me. when I touch the fine focus knob the image wiggles. Even small vibrations cause the image on the screen to move.

Would those tiny movements matter when the image is shot at 1/60th sec?


I also have a Canon 50D on a Kaiser copy stand with a 150 lens mounted on it for full coin photo shooting. It also has the XYZ linear stage trimming platform. I tried attaching the 10X objective to that lens; here's one of the shots:





The focus was on the field of the coin, but it really doesn't look very sharp either (to me). Maybe it's better?

Question 1: Is my setup correct, or am I missing something to allow sharp focus?

Question 2: Could a tiny vibration of the copy stand cause a blurred image when shot at 1/69th of a second?

Question 3: Are my cheap lens and objective the problem, or should they be sufficient for the job?

If you're seeing a lot of movement in the 100% Live View screen, it's going to be hard to get a sharp image with continuous lighting. I'm not a flash guy but I think you need to be at 1/500 or faster to "freeze" the movement. Once you stop touching the system, how long til it totally stops moving?

I know for the Rebel series, EFSC is automatically engaged along with Live View. But for the 60D, you may need to invoke the EFSC setting in the camera menu. It's not likely to be available in EOS Utility. It may be called "Quiet mode" or similar. If EFSC is not set then that could explain the blurriness issue.

The 150mm lens looks like it is vignetting the objective. Is the aperture wide open?

Yes, most likely movement of the shutter. At least that's what I'm hoping, since that is easily solved with your camera settings.

What and interesting thread. I'll have to collect more data, but something I know from experience is, adding an objective to the front of a lens has the same effect as adding a tele converter. Not visually but logically. "How to you make a great lens, into an average lens?" Add some kind of optical converter.

Stacking is interesting. Bellows or extension tubes. They don't add a lens to the lens, that wasn't designed to be there.

Best methods, which I haven't enjoyed, but from someone who knows better than me, is move the camera not the subject.

However... a coin is light and small, I'd think moving the coin, would make for less problems with alignment.

The problem with moving the coin is that the lighting changes. If you move the camera, the lighting on the coin remains identical for each shot.

For the posts that mention microns, that's right. The steps can be that small if you want to cover each step properly, before you do the stacking.

So far my efforts to photograph grains of sugar, for example, have been less than stunning. I tend to be flying from one project to another, so the stepper and macro got moved aside for the overhead. Then I did some coins with the copy stand and there's a rotating table for doing time-lapse.

Affinity Pro editing software which is full photo editing software, includes a focus stacking feature. 90 days free trial, which is very nice of them. To buy the package is $24.99 which might be a better option that an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription? I use Adobe Elements stand alone.

Point is, focus stacking that so far looks suitable, for free trial https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/ if anyone here who is more involved and serious would like to test and experiment. I like free...

By no means can I claim any expertise in this field, but I did some experimenting with coin photography maybe 10-12 years ago combining the "Super High Quality" and "Super Macro" settings on my dinky little Olympus 4-mp non-SLR digital camera. Certainly not "extreme," but it taught me a few things.

What I learned was that the only way I could avoid the problem of "shutter motion" and get a sharp, clear shot of anything was to use the timer function. The 10-second delay always proved long enough to calm everything down.

Of course, for starters, I had the camera well-fastened to a proper copy stand...but the timer was the key.

My little ship here was captured that way from the whitecaps next to the Eddystone Light on my 25mm Devonshire shilling (Dalton 1,1811-12). To illustrate scale, I'll post the whole token below the ship.

Looks cool!

Nicely done G! And you've got some cool stuff, very eclectic and photogenic.

Gluggo - looking good! To stop the rotating be sure your auto rotate is off in the camera settings. That may be switching you up as it moves a bit for the shots and rotating in camera. I always leave mine off.