How to take great coin photos with your mobile phone! - to sell on eBay, for estate & insurance...

you have a collection of coins and you want to take great pictures of them so you can show them at a coin club coin show to other collectors or sell them on ebay or maybe you need to catalog your collection for a state for your insurance or you just want to know what you have you're having problems with centering focus it's dim it has glare or shadows and it's just hard to handle you could buy the professional equipment but you already have a camera on your phone and you like the convenience so what can you do hi my name is mike i'm one of the programmers at midstate.com and i'm going to show you how to use your mobile phone with a few simple and inexpensive items to create your very own mini coin studio all we're going to need is a selfie ring and a plumbing fitting i'll include links in the description screwdriver something to raise the coin from from the background and anything to use for the background like a color piece of paper or mouse pad all this can be found around the house and at local stores or it can be shipped to you directly from amazon i ordered the exact items linked in the video description from amazon a few days ago i wanted to make sure that what i'm showing you here is exactly what you'd get while you watch me put the thing together let me tell you i've used other selfie rings and rubber fittings in the past to take coin photos for application development some slightly vary in size and fit together a little differently we get a lot of emails asking for recommendations on camera setups and usb microscopes for coin pictures but this is by far the simplest and cheapest way i've found some people have suggested setting your phone on a stack of books or a platform of some kind this works for keeping your phone still while taking the photo but it doesn't really address the lighting issue it's hard to get the little camera lens perched out far enough over the ledge to take a clean shot at the coin it may take a little persuasion this combination is a little tight in the way it fits if you run into a problem with that you can always go to your local hardware store they have these fittings there you can take your selfie ring and just match them up here you see the last step of me tightening it up now if you didn't want to use the selfie ring or the rubber fitting for something else you could always super glue the two together next i'm going to show you how easy this works with a phone give you some tips on phone settings and show you some example photos so you know exactly what to expect overall if you're not a coin dealer or a super avid collector this is definitely the way to go as you watch me take some photos you'll notice how quickly it can be done your zoom and lighting can be set on the first coin and it should retain those settings as you take all the next photos i imagine you could shoot 50 to 100 coins offers and reverse in an hour or so you might have wondered why i put a plastic soda lid under the coin for some phones that'll help the auto zoom feature focus on the coin instead of the background but mainly i like the effect of the coin floating above the background when i was taking these shots i did include some of the color settings on my phone i'll show them as examples now i have a phone model that's over five years old notice the tiny screen i use it so that i can be sure that even the older phones will work with our programming your phone is almost certainly newer so you should have a better higher resolution camera this method is great for showing coin details but you do lose some luster if you have ideas to modify this for better luster please comment some site visitors that have seen the initial article on this topic have asked about how this would work with slab coins or coins and flips or even albums slab coins at least the newer ones have a scratch and glare resistance plastic lens and lens is almost perfectly flat if you're using a selfie ring light that is too strong you might get some glare but i found it to be not that much of an issue fitting a slab into the mini studio is an issue though we put little pads under the base of the studio to raise it about a quarter of an inch so the slabs could sit under the tube and move freely around you can further diffuse the light by simply covering it with some paper or cloth flips are a little different story as their vinyl curves over the coin and bounces the light causing glare so we recommend coins be taken out of flips and albums too next we're going to see how easy this method is for uploading your coins to the mint state free coin collection application if you haven't yet come check us out there are many articles videos and free applications for the coin community it's getting great reviews from our visitors and i know you'll be glad you did looks like my phone needs a break so after i charge it up we're going to upload some coins to the collection app here at the mnstate.com site after you've registered for free or you're returning and have logged in we can select the coin application we will be adding a morgan dollar to our current collection or we could change the coin type with these selection options scrolling down a little i'm clicking the add coin button which opens up a new coin record form to upload the first image i'll just press the obverse upload icon the phone asks me if i want to take a new photo or use one already stored on my phone so here's where the coin studio is used i'll just slide the phone into the selfie clip and start adjusting the phone to adjust the size and align the shot make sure you're uploading the side of the coin that you've selected if you do make some kind of mistake or want to upload a different photo after you've changed some settings it's nothing to worry about as you can re-upload the photo anytime on most phones you also have the option to use the picture you just took or retake the photo if you're not pleased with the shot i'll tell the phone to use this shot and the image will begin to upload the upload time is going to depend on your mobile data connection and the resolution of your camera most cameras have settings for file format and size for photos taken by the camera i'd recommend somewhere between two to four megabyte range and a file format that uses compression to reduce your wait time so now we'll flip the coin and repeat the process for the reverse side i could fill in the details about the coin in my collection but instead let's just hit update to save the record and we'll take a closer look at the image while i zoom in on the uploaded image let me again invite you to use mnstate.com's free applications for coin collectors also please subscribe to our channel as we use youtube to let our users know all the new changes as always thank you for supporting pennstate.com

Channel: MintState Coin Technologies

Views: 33,054

Keywords: Sell coins on eBay, coin photography, coin photography setup, coin photography ideas, how to take great coin photos, how to take great coin pictures, coin pictures, coin pictures front and back, Coin insurance, how to photograph coins, special technique for coin photo, photograph coins, Stunning Coin Photography, Photographing coins using your phone, Coin photography, photograph coin collection, coin photo device, coin collection software, coin collection online, coin value

Id: Qp7DEJ5Vzmc

Length: 7min 0sec (420 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 06 2020