Photographing coins for selling - guidelines

Photographing coins for selling

The way to get the best possible price for your coins on a website is to prepare a carefully worded description together with a good quality picture that accurately represents the coin. When selling face to face the buyer can touch and handle the goods - on the web this is clearly impossible.

Correct classification and a good verbal description of condition is obviously important but at the end of the day the picture is the clincher. A fuzzy incorrectly exposed picture is possibly even worse than none at all.

Unfortunately producing good pictures is no easy task for an amateur - this guide is based on personal experience and advice given freely by Alvin - eBay seller exp390 whose good quality images stood out from the rest.

Flatbed Scanner

The quickest and simplest way to produce a passable coin picture is to use a flatbed scanner. It should produce a sharp image with even illumination. Use the native scanner resolution (not its maximum resolution - this is typically 300-1200dpi) and resize using your image editing software. You may wish to scan several coins together and cut to seperate images later. We suggest that after a multiple coin scan you turn over each coin in place and rescan the obverse - this makes matching the sides of any coin easy when producing a two-side picture. Silver coins often look better in greyscale as a false colour cast can look like tarnish. Obviously if the coins are genuinely tarnished a full colour image should be used to avoid misrepresentation.

Easy? Yes but...
Scanner produced images seem to have a very flat appearance and often do not show coins at their best. For coins with good lustre presented with a scanned image you need to point out that the coin has lustre not obvious in the image. For best results you need to turn to photography.

Photography

Most modern digital cameras with a macro mode are capable of producing photographs of coins but you may need to experiment with the setup and take several shots to get the best results.

The first big no-no is flash - you may be able get a passable image - possibly by softening the flash with a handkerchief or similar - but good natural or artificial light will give better results.

Unfortunately the physics of photography is working against you - with low light levels the camera will select a large aperture (low F-number) and slow shutter - both bad. The low F-number decreases the depth of field making focusing more critical and the slow shutter increases the risk of camera shake. Here is the reply we received from Alvin...

The camera I used is a fine pix F430.

I use a little tripod to go with the camera and a desk lamp that looks like the one in the pixar films that jumps on the i to replace it.

I sometimes use it black and white.

Setting the light seems to work better when it is as far away on silver coins as far as it will reach, on copper coins the light seems to be better nearer.

I use the camera on macro setting without flash with the rest of camera settings normal but I do adust them from time to time.

I have taught myself. I have seen one coin seller do a lot better than me but I can't find his email address at the moment I will try to help if you need more advice.


Coin Trader wishes to thank Alvin for this - if you see a coin you want on eBay offered by exp390 you can see from his detailed reply to a question that was not related to buying anything that he is one of the good guys - buy with confidence.

One further tip - if possible use a cable release to avoid camera shake. As this is not possible on many digital cameras a good alternative is to use the self timer facility which most do have.

Any further tips from visitors on this issue would be very welcome.

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