Old British Penny

[stevelee]

I recently found a 1963 British penny, from before decimalization I have no idea why I have it. It may have been in my parents' home, but I have no idea why they would have one. My first trip to England was in 1976, after this coin had been retired. Shilling coins were still in circulation since they were used along side 5 new pence coins. I have been trying out my EF lenses adapted for the Fujifilm 100S, so I decided to try that combination to shoot the coin. The diameter is about 1 1/4 inches, so the larger sensor allowed would fit the coin at 1:1. The lens is the 100mm f/2.8 non-L macro, shot at f/11. I've cropped it, but I could see no vignetting in the original shot. The date is shown as a 100% crop. The whole coin shots are about 16% size.

 

[Maximilian]

Would be a nice subject for step up rings or the MP-E…

 

[stevelee]

I have considered renting the MP-E, but I suspect that having it for just a couple weeks wouldn‘t give enough time for me to get the hang of using it. I do use extension tubes with the 100mm from time to time, but rarely have subjects that need them. The resolution of the shots of the penny would easily allow for prints 2 1/2 feet square. That seems sufficient for me. But thanks for the suggestion. In early spring I will have access to small flower blossoms and insects, so might get back into doing more macros then.

 

[SteveC]

Were you hand-holding the camera?

That's the exact lens I use for my coin photography, though I'm usually shooting at f/5.6 unless the coin is high relief.

 

[stevelee]

Were you hand-holding the camera?

That's the exact lens I use for my coin photography, though I'm usually shooting at f/5.6 unless the coin is high relief.

No, I was using a tripod. After I got the 100S and I shot the moon with the 100–400mm L on it, I decided that the ball head was not sturdy enough to deal with that much weight. It really had been marginal on the 6D2 anyway. So I got a Really Right Stuff head, and it seems to work better. So I tried it with the 100mm macro. The tripod use was a lot of the point of taking this picture, plus the added resolution from the Fuji. I have a cheap ring light for the lens. So put that all together, and f/11 was no trick at all. Manual focus assistance works really well on the Fuji. I used red focus peaking in this case. I also had the camera on a rail, so I put the lens on 1:1 and used the rail to focus. It’s a great lens, and supposedly best between f/8 and f/11. I don’t see any hint of diffraction in these shots at f/11. Given that the lens covers the whole MF frame, I see no reason to spend a fortune for a GFX macro lens. I mainly got the Fuji to use for landscapes, so I will continue to use my 6D2 and most of my EF lenses on it or the Fuji, as seems appropriate. I don’t know whether extension tubes are more likely (or less likely) to add vignetting, so I’ll try that sometime to see. With the extra resolution, I can easily crop the corners out and still have more pixels than with my 6D2.

 

[SteveC]

No, I was using a tripod. After I got the 100S and I shot the moon with the 100–400mm L on it, I decided that the ball head was not sturdy enough to deal with that much weight. It really had been marginal on the 6D2 anyway. So I got a Really Right Stuff head, and it seems to work better. So I tried it with the 100mm macro. The tripod use was a lot of the point of taking this picture, plus the added resolution from the Fuji. I have a cheap ring light for the lens. So put that all together, and f/11 was no trick at all. Manual focus assistance works really well on the Fuji. I used red focus peaking in this case. I also had the camera on a rail, so I put the lens on 1:1 and used the rail to focus. It’s a great lens, and supposedly best between f/8 and f/11. I don’t see any hint of diffraction in these shots at f/11. Given that the lens covers the whole MF frame, I see no reason to spend a fortune for a GFX macro lens. I mainly got the Fuji to use for landscapes, so I will continue to use my 6D2 and most of my EF lenses on it or the Fuji, as seems appropriate. I don’t know whether extension tubes are more likely (or less likely) to add vignetting, so I’ll try that sometime to see. With the extra resolution, I can easily crop the corners out and still have more pixels than with my 6D2.

I use a copy stand and tether the camera for remote shooting. That way I can get the coin to fill the frame (unless it's a very small coin) and I can zoom 5x to focus--that and being able to project it on a monitor while focusing means I can get it tack sharp even at 100%.
Being able to blow up a dime to be 3 feet wide (if only the monitor were big enough to show the whole image at 4000x6000px) can be quite revealing.

 

[stevelee]

For further grins, I decided to try the same setup, but instead use the pixel shift mode to produce a 400MP file. The final print could be almost six feet square. And I figured the coin wouldn't move around a lot during the 16 shots. I did all the usual things to minimize vibrations, including making sure that the refrigerator motor wasn't running. Results were not spectacular, but probably usable for anything other than pixel peeping. Maybe I have exceeded the resolving power of the macro lens or my ability to focus accurately even with the aids on the screen, or maybe f/11 brings in enough diffraction to soften things. The combining software complained about each of the six shots I took, but did produce usable DNG files. Here are 100% crops of the 'R' from the obverse and the '9' from the reverse. Compare to the 100% '9' above.

 

[SteveC]

I know it ends up looking not quite in focus. Whether that's an artifact of your process, I don't know (and it would be hard to focus accurately through the viewfinder or back screen in this case).

Generally, since I don't care about the background (beyond the coin), I simply set my aperture to be narrow enough to put the entire coin depth in focus (I usually do well with f/5.6). There's little reason to focus stack (as one would want to do with an insect on a flower taken very close up, for instance). Since the coin is stationary a longer exposure shouldn't be too damaging if you need a wider aperture.

 

[stevelee]

I posted about my attempt at 400MP shooting on a GFX group on Facebook. I got a response from a guy who regularly does huge landscapes. He posted a link to an amazing huge picture. He said that the combining software doesn’t like f/11. At macro distance things are probably worse.