Zurie's Photo Setup?

Hi @Brandmeister, I just saw this post--thanks for the compliment!

There are numerous posts in the photography forum that describe many approaches for taking nice coin photos, but here's what I found works for me. I use an old Nikon D90 camera body and a Nikkor 105mm macro lens mounted on a tripod (although almost any DSLR with a macro lens would probably work fine). I leave the camera settings at ISO 200, F/8, and 1/40 sec, but those can vary depending on the amount of lighting. I put the coin on a pedestal to blur the background, and the front of the lens is about a foot from the coin to give room for lighting. I manually focus the coin with a magnified LiveView, and I use a shutter delay to avoid camera shake. I usually use 2 handheld LED lights with the camera white balance set to the correct color temperature. For uncirculated coins I'll take a few shots using various light positions to optimize luster. Since I leave the camera always set up, it usually requires minimal adjustments other than lighting angles, and I can take several shots of a coin within a minute.

For post-processing, I transfer the files to my computer and use Photoshop Elements. I'll pick the obverse and reverse photos with the best lighting, and square crop them and rotate as needed to straighten. Then I make some minor adjustments in color saturation and exposure to get the color more accurate. Since I use artificial light and set the white balance in-camera, the color is usually pretty accurate to start. I'll resize the image to a width of 900 pixels, and save with some compression to a file size of 200 to 300kb.

Hope that's helpful!