What's Remains In The Pocket

Besides the lint.

To give myself one last post this weekend, and to fully exploit the latest batch of pictures that I have taken of coins, let us look at some random shots of coins that have no (particular) story.

This is one of my favorite ways to display coins, but it is reserved for those coins not valuable enough to be shown individually. Which is to say, these coins have value above their face, but that value is based on the silver content, rather than any numismatic concern.

I like this style of shooting coins because it gives the coins some dimension and character. I wrote a piece about this, several months back, re: the depth of field effect, but I am not interested in fishing it out of the archives. It’s there, if you’d care to search.

These group shots also appeal to me because of the variations of light and dark shown across the image. With a completely flat shot, you you can see the shine of the coin, the luster of the surface, even shadows that can form behind the tallest parts of the engraving, but the sense os things being FLAT is hard to overcome.

With coins arranged with a vertical element (even shooting as a flat-lay) you can induce a sense of depth. I find it a more interesting way to look at coins, because it causes your eye to hunt through the image, looking for all of the interesting visual elements.

When shooting a single coin, one that has fine detail in the engraving, I like to shoot directly across the face of the coin. My strobe is placed at a 90° angle to the face of the coin, even with a softbox, the light is sharp enough to get into the small details and show the gorgeous texture. But that’s the thing, the light is sharp, stacking the coins, causes the light to soften.

The settings on my camera, and the placement of the strobe, is exactly the same in this group shot as it was for the Indian Head coin, but notice that the quality of light has changed. I would describe it as having the light linger in the group shot, whereas, it was rushing past the single coin; the light falls into the deeper pockets.

The effect is even more noticeable when you shoot a darker collection of coins.

The fine details of these coins (such as it is), is seen, but the contrast is weaker and the eye sees it as being softer. With the Indian Head coin, I want the viewers eye to see the sharp light because the detail is sharp, with these pennies, the details have softened, so there is no benefit of hitting the coins with a sharp light.

Also, with these stacked, group shots, there is sometimes an element of compositional serendipity that I appreciate. In this shot, I dropped these dimes on my backdrop and this is how they landed. I did bring each of the top coins onto the lower coins, because they were angled down at the edge, but I did not change the orientation of the faces. I really like the look.