During the early industrial age, tea and exotic spices arrived in England from across the empire. Still, ironically, it was often easier to find these items in stores than to obtain the coins needed to purchase them. In this era of coinage chaos, trade tokens became the people's currency.

There is an art to Coin Photography. In this article in the Canadian Association for Photographic Art’s monthly magazine, Canadian Camera, I discuss coin collecting and coin photography and my inspirations for both. Since this was published, I’ve discovered Jack Black is another famous coin collector.

In coin image editing there are a lot of tasks that are repetitive, and thanks to Photoshop, they can be made into actions. If you’re only editing one image at a time, you might think actions are more work than they’re worth, but I think you’d be surprised.

It can be tricky to capture detail in dark coins, but under exposing a dark coin is not a problem you can fix in post-production. If you don’t capture the shadow information when you click the shutter, it’s lost for good.