Digital Coin Photography – H. Craig Hamling – October 2001

The Stand

You can really use any camera stand or tripod to hold the camera.  I use a homemade stand which consists of a heavy piece of oak for the base, another slab of oak for a side support and a flash holder that I used with a Pentax 35mm SLR in the 1970’s.  This stand works well because it is solid and doesn’t get in the way of the light.

This sort of stand has another advantage in that it is easy to use “shims” to bring the coin up to the lens.  The picture shown above is the setup that was used to make the dime picture shown earlier.  Here the shims consist of two paste board box lids and a pad of yellow post-it notes.

Please also note that to make this particular picture the camera is oriented such that it is looking straight down onto the coin and that the light is positioned to come from the side.  More on this later…

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