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Coin Photographs with a White Background


There are eleven pages about photographing coins:

Black Background — White Background (this page) — Photographing the EdgesUsing Extension TubesChoosing the Best ISO SettingChoosing the Best ApertureChoosing the Best ExposureEditing the BackgroundKeeping Detail in the HighlightsProcessing Your ImageSome Final Tweaks


Camera setup for white background This works nicely to produce photos with a good white background, if you have some photo manipulation software. The idea is to take a shot which has a neutral grey background which can easily be edited out. I will get to that a few pages later on.

Camera setup for white background The stage for the coins is very cheap and simple. You see here a plastic food container, with white paper lining the inside, bottom and sides. There is also a kitchen foil reflector standing up behind, held in place by the box itself.

I based this on a system explained by Pat Lawrence, which used a ground glass plate. (More about that below.) To simulate this, I tried sellotaping a square of a single ply of Kleenex paper tissue under the lid, to diffuse the light, as shown on the left. (I split a normal paper hankie.) The coin sits on the plastic lid above this. That worked OK, but the tissue turned out not to be necessary. The translucency of the plastic and the distance to the bottom of the container are enough to blur the background very satisfactorily, and in fact this gives a more even background which is easier to process.

Though you can't see them, I have placed a couple of (modern) coins under the food container to compensate for the slight slope of its lid.

You can see the lens pointing down, and part of the tripod to which the camera is attached. This is shown in full on the previous page.

The light source – better than the one I used to use – is a "Gerald touch lamp" from Focus DIY at £14.99. The bulb is a 40-watt G9 capsule, this one branded Osram Halogen. This is a nice bright light for its size, and the opalescent shade gives a very useful diffused effect. The flexible goose neck allows a lot of freedom in how you position it. I seem to get the best results from having it fairly high up, close to the lens.

You can see that the light isn't "pointed" straight at the coin. This bulb is elongated, so having it slightly sideways on to the coin gives the brightest illumination. I suggest that you try different positions with your light and see what works best.

Because some coins won't rest parallel to the surface, you light want to use a small wooden wedge for fine adjustments of the tilt of the stage.

Credit: This setup is based on one described by Pat Lawrence on the Forvm Classical Numismatics Discussion Board. Pat's system uses a ceramic kitchen tray with a white interior, with a sheet of ground glass placed over it.

That's a great setup, but mine is cheaper and it's easy to get the components. There's no potential danger from glass breakage, and there's no chance of coins being scatched or worn by movement over glass. It gives excellent results. It's easy to keep the surface clean and dust-free. You should still try not to scrape coins over the plastic, because the plastic does scratch. This will eventually result in an uneven and marked background to your photos, needing more processing work. But if you do damage it, it costs £1.50 to replace – less than three dollars US.

A denarius of Septimius Severus with a Dea Caelestis reverse When taking photos, first use a gray card, or if you don't have one, try the empty stage; and set "custom white balance" to that. If you have a decent camera, you can take a high quality JPEG and that will be good enough for all normal purposes.

Here is an example of a silver coin with a white background. This is a denarius of Septimius Severus from the Rome mint, 204 CE. All the detail is clear, more so than when I tried the same coin with a black background. It's a very shiny coin, hard to get right. With a black background, the edge of a coin tends to be too dark to see. Here it's quite visible, giving a nice 3-D effect.


There are eleven pages about photographing coins:

Black Background — White Background (this page) — Photographing the EdgesUsing Extension TubesChoosing the Best ISO SettingChoosing the Best ApertureChoosing the Best ExposureEditing the BackgroundKeeping Detail in the HighlightsProcessing Your ImageSome Final Tweaks


The content of this page was last updated on 27 January 2011

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