Opinions Or Pointers W/ Sd780is

SuperDave, thanks for the quick response and giving me some hope...I was getting frustrated.Yes I was using manual settings so I'll change the ISO and then start looking for some post processing tips. I needed direction...95% of my hair has been pulled out.I'll double check the parallel too, I know to do that from your posts,but maybe I need a more accurate way of setting it up.

chequer, I am lost with artificial light...I need to do some reading on here but am so caught up in roll searching that I just keep putting it off.

It's working. Your Canon can do it. Don't mess with it. Yes, there's that little band of brightness from the hair down to near the lapel, but it doesn't interfere with eye appeal or the grading-quality of the photograph.

Was I right in thinking your images are a lot larger than you're showing here? If so, you can back the camera off a bit in order to possibly bring different lighting into the picture. What you have here is large enough to come up with a reasonable grade; if you shoot for an as-shot image size of 800 pixels (as opposed to the 600 pixels of the image you posted), you might get the camera a fair distance from the coin. You don't need the final image larger than 800 pixels if it's nice enough.

If this is the actual size of your images, and you're using the camera on the highest quality setting, then work with what you know works for light and we'll see what incremental steps we can take to improve.

If you were only an inch from the coin, then you didn't have much left to crop and those pics were stupid big before you downsized them

You're doing this even better than I thought. Email me a full-sized image, and I'll show you what I mean.

^^^^

I strongly urge you not to listen to that man, whose God-given skills are ridiculous and he probably shot that with his eyes closed.

For the purpose of our conversation, stick to newer Lincolns. They're very, very difficult to get right because of the combination of luster, color and indifferent relief; I suspect you could duplicate DVCollector's tremendous results today with a similar coin. You've already chosen the hard way, and are getting great results with it. The rest (excepting lustrous silver, another problem entirely) will come easy.

Newer pennies are a problem for me.But I wasn't able to email a pic to you...didn't see a way to attach it using our PM system...figured if you reply,I'll be able to do it.

I got the pic. Forgive me for not replying - your image was one of over 200 I received yesterday alone, and I'm the proverbial one-armed paperhanger these days.

It was so big I had to giggle. I had no idea you were getting such large images from that camera. It's bigger than my dSLR and 100mm Macro lens provides. Amazing results from such a tiny camera; this one just went way up on my list of "bang for the buck" coin cameras.

With that said, you're giving up a little focus in return for size, I think. The coin looks nice and sharp once downsized, but the camera's limitations show up in the fullsize image. As I thought, it was a tiny bit out-of-parallel, the left side being in focus while the right was not. You can, I think, double the distance between camera and coin during the process of experimentation. I believe you'll still have images way too large to post here, and the camera will have an easier time of focusing.

Machine Doubling. This is silly - a camera the size of a cellphone should not be able to do this.