…And as a result, I’m going to shift gears and attack it from a different angle. Preparing these posts for my series on coin photography is one of the biggest challenges to my writing that I have faced. After the last post on the importance of proper white balance, I realized that my writing was bordering on the technical and less on my personal writing style.

Technical writing can get pretty boring unless you are a techie. Now I’m not putting down persons who eat up technical writing for lunch but I am not one of them. My attention span will simply not tolerate a bunch of facts and figures, it’s just not the way I’m wired. For me to document everything I have learned in photography is a drudgery. What I do love is storytelling which is one of the reasons I love history and going down rabbit holes to find interesting facts I can talk about.

Therefore, I’ll briefly cover the technical stuff and editorialize why I like certain set-ups and not others using comparative pictures. From that standpoint, you can determine what you like based on your own tastes and what equipment to buy. I cannot tell you everything I have learned over the past 10 years taking pictures of coins. However, I can point you in a direction and let you do your own experimentation and learning. You’ll start seeing the new angle in my next post.

Some of the neatest coins out there can cost you next to nothing. I had some e-bay bucks to use up on my latest coin purchase that listed for just nine dollars! That coin is a 2nd Spanish Republic 1937 one peseta coin. In the years spanning the Spanish Civil  War, this was one of many coins issued by the different Spanish provinces. I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a collection based on the Spanish Civil War, but I digress.

I have been looking to buy this peseta coin for some time now but have found it to be typically offered in very poor condition. That was until now! I’m posting the picture of my coin using a diffused lighting source (CFL white daylight lamps.) I have elevated the coin on the stand so as to more directly point the lamp at the coin without it getting in the way of the camera. (Notice the brown box underneath the coin). My lens setting was f4. The ISO setting was 200 and the shutter speed was 1/160th of a second. More on all this later! (I’ll tell you my settings but avoid spending a lot of time to explain them. For that you’ll have to Google it on your own). Gary

It is perhaps an irony that I can figure out how to take good pictures and haven't figured out how to have them appear in their proper orientation on this blog!