1000+ Ancient Coins
1000+ Ancient Coins is my second “move-in” project this summer. I spent 3 and a half weeks at the Yale Art Gallery’s Coins and Medals Department creating obverse and reverse images of two collection segments and other greatest hits to fill out a total count of about 1050 coins. Phew. Thanks to William Metcalf, curator and especially Jane Miller, museum assistant, for all their assistance getting me through.
Images were captured with the relatively simple setup as seen below in the production still gallery. The coins photographed varied from about 4cm to .5cm in diameter. Print size (aka indication of image resolution) from my captures was on average over 16cm. Obverse and reverse images were combined into one final image with a reference scale. Varying amounts of extension were required from about 56mm to over 200mm. As can be imagined depth of field was nearly non-existent and so for many of the smaller coins a post production technique called focus stacking was employed to get sharp images of lumpy objects.
 Macro Setup |
 Viewfinder |
 Tiny Coin |
 Tiny Coin 2 |
 Mobile Setup |
 Gold Coin |
Update: Check out the project page I made for the 1000+ coins where you can see some zoomed details, project specs and a wall of coins.