AstroStu1

Thanks to @brg5658 for the guide, it's similar to what I had done a decade ago. I left the boards here for many years because I got busy with work, and apparently my extensive, vast post history disappeared so it looks like this is only my first post! I thought I'd check them out because I've been re-inventorying (auditing) my collection for insurance purposes. It's nice to see helpful, educational posts like the original one on this thread. But the rest of the thread reminds me why I stopped reading and posting to internet forums years ago. Sigh. And now to pile on the dumpster fire before I take my leave again, speaking as an occasional professional photographer (not my main job, but it's a job): As others have said, depth-of-focus has to do with the lens' aperture, the distance between the lens and the object to focus on, and the focal length, as well as what's called the "circle of confusion" which has to do with imperfections in the lens' ability to focus light perfectly. Almost always, you want a coin to appear to be fully in focus. Almost always, you want it to have the correct geometry, meaning that if it's a perfect circle in real life, you want it to appear as a perfect circle in the photograph, without needing to digitally (or in film, manually) manipulate it. Unless you have a tilt-shift lens, which just makes things more complicated, there's no reason to tilt the coin to highlight different things, and it will make parts of the coin be more out-of-focus, whether you can tell that or not is a separate question. But usually with this sort of macro photography that is coin photography, it is a very shallow depth-of-focus so any perturbation will put it out-of-focus. As has been stated, the reason to tilt the coin is almost always because you want to highlight something different via lighting angle. Which gets to the original point of this thread: Instead of doing that with tilt, which makes the geometry distorted and can make parts of the coin be out-of-focus, just adjust your lights! Plain and simple. Really not sure why there are 5 pages of yelling about this.