Author: photog

Tom’s World – 20NOV2024 – Gold and Silver Coins

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TomD

Gold and Silver Coins

I’ve been acquiring/collecting gold and silver for the past 21 years. My motivation initially was to keep a store of PM (precious metals) as a hedge against economic “problems” but I quickly discovered that there was an aesthetic component to some of the coins. My 1st purchases were 100 and 1000 oz silver bars (in 2003 cheap) but they were as photogenic as bricks. When I discovered the offerings from some of the major mints around the work, it was a “Whoa” moment. So I started to photo them. It worked out that 2003 was right about the time digital cameras were becoming capable instruments.

Amusing that the owner of APMEX (American Precious Metals Exchange), the largest online seller of PM’s sent me an email in around 2006 asking if I would do all his product photography for him. I was happy for the recognition but I was a 50 something year old Civil Engineer at the time and I appreciate the offer but——

 

 

4 Ducat-  This is a restrike of a 1915 4 Ducat Austrian gold coin featuring Emperor Franz Joseph. The coin contains .44 oz (net) of gold. I’ve got a number of European gold fractionals (fractional oz) and some are quite nice if you manage to get one in good shape after 100-140 years. This coin is from the Austrian Mint

 

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2011 Kookaburra- From the Australian National Mint. The Kookaburra is just 1 of several yearly silver coin offerings from the Mint. All of them are incredibly nice and popular. This series started in 1993, different images each year, 1 oz of silver. As an aside, when I say one oz in the context of PM’s, I’m talking about Troy oz, not standard oz., the difference is 28.35 grams per standard oz vs 31.13 per Troy.

 

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ATB Florida- US Mint, ATB stands for America the Beautiful as in the state quarters  issued for several years. This isn’t a standard issue quarter but a 5 oz silver replica but still minted by the US Mint.  Some of the designs, like this Florida one, are quite nice, but others not so much.

 

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Britannia- By the British National Mint, one oz 24 kt gold. Britannia is the British equivalent of Uncle Sam. The coins were issued yearly, most years of different designs, in both gold and silver. A lot of the coins from this series are spectacular.

 

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Azteca Calendario- This came in different weights up to a kilogram, this one is 5 oz. You can find all sorts of base metal knockoffs of this coin but the real ones from the Casa De Moneda De México (Mexican National Mint) are fairly rare. I had a Mexican contact and we swapped  coins with each other for years. The Casa has  some beautiful coins and popular coins in its catalogue.

 

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Eagles- Silver American Eagles that is, from the US Mint. Probably the most popular, recognizable, desired and produced coins in the world. If you’re going to buy limited silver, get this one. Recognized everywhere and easily traded for cash. When I first started buying these, I paid $5 each, now they’re pushing $40.

 

GAE- As in Gold American Eagle. Ditto everything about the silver eagles. They are in 22 kt gold or 91% but the weight of gold is one full oz. I like that alloy, I’ve got 24 kt gold but it is too soft. I dropped a 24 kt coin once and it dented the he** out of it. Luckily, that particular coin had little numismatic premium and it was still 1 oz of gold after the drop.

 

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Maple Gold- This is the Canadian version of the GAE. These are .9999 gold. It was one of these that I dropped. This is a fairly early one and the image of the Queen is what is known as the “Hottie” Queen. The image was updated as the years went on to reflect the aging queen.

 

Of all these coins shown, only the Kookaburra and Calendario have any premium attached. All the rest, you could buy for close to spot price. For some reason, some years of SAE’s are rarer and the coins can cost you more. But just skip these years.

I might do another coin photo post down the line but I’ve got thousands of shots of beautiful coins and I don’t think that is the direction Photog wants his site to go in. But there are some incredibly beautiful coins series out there, Chinese Pandas, a number of private mint series, Britannias, ATB’s, Australian Lunar series, Australian Kangaroos, Canadian Predator series, Mexican, European coin types beyond count.

I was extremely lucky, one particular friend (now departed unfortunately), influenced me and got me started when I could accumulate most of this when PM’s were a fraction of current cost. I paid $250 for my 1st oz of gold.

TomD

The New Media Landscape

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Long, long ago in a reality far, far happier, there were things called newspapers and something called radio and something else called television.  Each of these was part of mass communication.  And each had its own mode of operation.  One of the most important considerations in all these media companies was the business model.  In other words, how did the newspaper or radio station or television network earn enough money to pay for all of the costs incurred in publishing a newspaper or running a radio or television station and also produce a profit.

And for the most part, advertising was the principal source of income.  For the most part, businesses paid money for ads in the newspaper or commercials during the air time of broadcasts.  And this system worked remarkably well to keep these media businesses profitable and stable.

But in the 1990s the internet started growing from humble beginnings to its present ubiquitous position.  And one thing its existence did was divert all of the advertising revenue that the newspapers and other media companies formerly collected, into the hands of a few large internet companies.  Specifically, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and X currently capture the lion’s share of this revenue.  And the result of this shift has been the impoverishment of most of the newspapers in the United States.  Even the ones that aren’t teetering on the verge of bankruptcy are just pale ghosts of their former selves.  The network television companies, ABC, NBC and CBS are slightly better off but aren’t looking very healthy either.

And the second way that the internet is endangering these media companies (including the cable television stations) is by providing competition for their viewers.  Netflix and Amazon and others provide streaming services that compete with both the news and entertainment programming that these stations provide.  And with respect to the news programming, the dishonesty and bias of the media news shows over the last few decades has alienated about half of the viewing public.

Throw this loss of audience due to distrust on top of the loss of advertising revenues due to the internet and what you get are companies like CNN and MSNBC that no longer have a viable business model.  When customers cut the cable because they don’t want the cable revenues going to people they hate, then the paying audience shrinks.  And if the shrinking audience scares off the little advertising they have left, then what you’re looking at is a death spiral for these cable news companies.

They’ve tried to mimic the streaming services and fill the gap with subscriptions.  But even delusional cable news executives have learned that no one is paying a monthly fee to see more Joy Reid and Andrea Mitchell.  That’s just not in the cards.  So, if you are Comcast or Warner Brothers-Discover what would you do with these dying companies?  Currently they say they are looking for buyers to unload them on.  To me that seems far-fetched.  Only an idiot would look at MSNBC and say, “Yes, I want to own this.  I know I can make lots of money by putting these people on tv.”

So, what they will do is set up a subsidiary that is made up entirely of these unwatchable channels.  And then they’ll let them sink or swim on their own revenue.  And they will sink.  And that will be the end of it.  The big question is will there be any cable news channels left at all.  Even though Fox News is doing better than their leftist competition they’re not as healthy as they once were.  It may be that cable news is no longer a viable product.  And we’ll find that out too.  Personally, I’d prefer to pay for subscriptions to sources that I like; whether they’re individuals or companies.  And it seems that the shake-out will soon clarify who and what will survive the current media meltdown.  One thing is for sure.  The next presidential election will have to happen without the help of Joy Reid and Dana Bash.  They’ll be working in the retail food industry and too busy at the fryolator to opine on politics.

20NOV2024 – Quote of the Day

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Hitherto the civil Power has been Christian. Even in countries separated from the Church, as in my own, the dictum was in force, when I was young, that: “Christianity was the law of the land”. Now, every where that goodly framework of society which is the creation of Christianity is throwing off Christianity. The dictum to which I have referred, with a hundred others which followed upon it, is gone, or is going every where; and, by the end of the century, unless the Almighty interferes, it will be forgotten. Hitherto, it has been considered that Religion alone, with its supernatural sanctions, was strong enough to secure submission of the masses of our population to law and order; now the Philosophers and Politicians are bent on satisfying this problem without the aid of Christianity.

John Henry Newman

Going, Going, Gone

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As I noted today, Morning Schmoe is kneeling in the snow outside the Pope’s window begging for clemency.  And he’s just the first.  There isn’t enough money at CNN and MSNBC to employ 20% of the talentless hacks that are currently on the payroll.  I can’t imagine that Warner Bros. Discovery wants to continue paying Anderson Cooper $20 million a year for doing whatever it is he does.  And there’s no way on Earth that NBC Universal is going to pay Joy Reid anything at all for the toxic sideshow that she puts on over there.  But the question mark is who gets to stay?

Will they keep some of the marquee players to maintain the pretense that these cable channels are “serious” journalism?  Or will they keep the cheapest talent and try to turn a profit that way?  If they’re smart, I think they should follow the latter course.  Their ratings have already reached the bottom so quality is no longer a consideration.  Cutting costs might extend the viability of these companies for a little longer.  But what’s going to happen to all of these unemployed “journalists?”  In a way CNN did a favor to Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon by letting them go first.  They got the first chance to find jobs before the glut of their peers.  Both of those guys probably lined up some sweet assignments with Uber and Papa Gino’s.

And things aren’t going to be much better for the Fox News guys.  Cable News is a dying industry.  For the foreseeable future it will be like a giant game of musical chairs with fewer and fewer chairs to go around.  Think of all the amazing characters that will disappear from your tv screen (well, that is if you regularly watch MSNBC and CNN.  Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough.  Jonathan Capehart, Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, Andrea Mitchell, Lawrence O’Donnell, Jen Psaki, Joy Reid, Al Sharpton, Chuck Todd, Dana Bash, Anderson Cooper, Van Jones and Jake Tapper.

Look at those names.  Irreplaceable talent.  Almost like friends; like really, really annoying friends.  The kind who says inappropriate things and borrow money.  The kind who won’t leave at the end of a party.  And suddenly they’ll all be gone.

Well maybe I can cope with the sadness of their loss by making a game of it.  Maybe I can start a betting pool on who goes first.  Who cries on screen?  Who takes the largest voluntary pay cut?  Who has to share an office with the security staff (my money is on Lawrence O’Donnell, he looks reasonable)?  Who goes postal (Mika)?

But most interesting is which if any will make the ultimate compromise and become a conservative to try and get a job at Fox News?  I’d say the early money is on our good friend Joe Scarborough.  After all he was a Republican congressman before having the lobotomy.  It wouldn’t take hardly any makeup to turn him into a rabid MAGA attack dog.  And I’m sure Mika could make the same transition with no real difficulty at all.  Boy, it’s good that the fourth estate is there to take care of us.

Morning Schmoe and Lycra Spandexy Bend the Knee to Trump

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I guess we all should have seen this coming.

Is there any lower form of life than Morning Schmoe?  The answer is a resounding no.  After attacking Trump for eight years he crawled on his belly and did obeisance.  And he even dragged his half-witted ditz along for moral support.

What’s next?  Will Keith Olbermann be the next lefty hack to wash up on the shore of Mar a Lago begging for forgiveness?  Has word gotten out that this is the only way to escape from right-wing death squads?  How about Rosie O’Donnell?

I don’t know.  The whole thing is so embarrassing.  The next thing you know Bruce Springsteen and Robert DeNiro will be seen wearing MAGA sweatshirts.  No self respect.

Calibrating a Focus Bracket with the Sony 90mm Macro Lens on the A7 IV

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TomD brought up a lot of good points about the limitations and vagaries of focus stacking so I tried to get a better handle on the mechanics of the settings used.

And when in need of a handy dandy close up subject I hauled out my extremely dead tarantula spider.  He has the benefit of being a rather large macro subject.  So I arranged the camera on a tripod at the minimum focal distance and set the bracket spacing to 4 out of 10 and selected 125 frames.  After the end I measured the length of the spider that was in focus in the bracket.  It came to about 2.5 inches.  Now this is a ballpark because there was an angle to the camera.  but this gives a decent idea of how many shots are needed to cover a depth of field.

Here is the first bracket frame

Here’s the last (125th) frame

Here is the stacked composite

And finally here is a photo taken from the same distance at a very small aperture (f\18) as a comparison.

Now this stack took 50 minutes to crank out on my laptop.  Is it worth the time and effort?  I guess that’s a personal choice.  But I’m kind of enjoying playing around with a new technique.  And that’s probably the nerd in me showing through.

 

Update:

TomD commented:

As a lifelong certified arachnophobe, 2.5” inches is entirely too big (by at least an order of magnitude) for a live spider to be.

Thanks for the experiment! Enlightening!

Even with 4 steps/per frame x 125 frames, or 500 steps, it still didn’t get the abdomen. So 500 steps only covered around 1.75”?

That’s extremely unintuitive and approaching unusable.

As I said in an earlier post, the software that I played with at the camera club would have the entire object with 8-10 exposures.

Maybe that’s more a function of the lens than the software. I’ve done a lot of macro work using several lenses and noticed that macro lenses with a very close focus all have a razor thin usable depth of field. I wonder what would happen if you took a good prime lens in the 85+mm range, moved it back and tried the same experiment at something like f8?

You would have to crop in to get the same image size but I’ve noticed that ou A7IV’s can be cropped quite a ways and still have great IQ’s (image quality).

Using the setup specs of your experiment, I’d say that the upper dof limit is in the inch range.

photog replied:

Tom, I’m going to play around with this function.  I want to see what I can do with it.  It seems like an interesting tool that I might find some good applications for.  But I can see that it might not have any compelling uses for most people.

Alright Then, Bald headed Women

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Cat Ladies are scared.  They can’t tell who voted for Trump.  They say they want Kamala voters to wear a blue bracelet to identify them to each other.  And they want to shave their heads.  And they want to wear COVID masks.  Well, that’s a lot of stuff.  So, I guess there is potentially 48% of white women out there who might start walking around with shaved heads, surgical masks and blue bracelets.

I’ve gotta say, that’s a pretty horrendous situation.  Most of these blue-haired cat ladies aren’t the most attractive bunch.  As a group they’re also pretty grouchy to start with and now after the election they’re going on TikTok and Instagram and yelling a lot and threatening to stop having sex.  And that’s fine.  I don’t think anyone is going to insist they have sex.  In fact, for a lot of them it might be for the best.  I’m no expert on modern relationships but I think, for the most part, most men prefer women with hair.  And a lot of them prefer a woman who doesn’t hate men.  Maybe not all but a lot of them.

And even for us who don’t plan to have sex with random former-blue-haired bald women, we still have to see them walking around with their bald heads.  It’s not great.  I mean you get used to women having hair.  It’s going to be like some kind of dystopian science fiction story with these ugly bald women wearing masks and glaring at us without blue bracelets.  And do you think that the blue hair dye will end up dyeing their heads blue too?  I don’t think I could deal with that.  Bald blue-headed angry women wearing surgical masks.  It’s a bit much.

As a man with short hair I can say definitively that a shaved head makes living in the northeast more difficult.  As bald people well know the human body loses a lot of heat from the head and this is exacerbated by baldness.  I don’t know if these women are aware.  Maybe they’ll reconsider.  I’ll bet a lot of them don’t even have hats anymore.  Well, these particular women probably have those pink hats from their marches back in 2017.  I guess they could repurpose those to keep their bald heads warm in the winter.  That wouldn’t be so bad.  So maybe this won’t be so bad.  I wonder if we could persuade them to wear the hats indoors too.  We could compliment them on how nice the hats make them look.  You know compliment them, respectfully.  Not hit on them or anything.  Not enough to get them thinking about sex again.  Just enough to keep those hats on their big bald blue heads.

As I said, a lot of these women are very angry.  They keep talking about attacking and shooting Trump voters.  That’s not good.  I mean, who would want to be punched or shot by an angry bald-headed woman?  I know I don’t.  It would be embarrassing to admit.

Maybe I should get me one of those blue bracelets.  How much could it cost; five, six bucks?  Of course, if it’s a lot more maybe I can make on out of blue electrical wire.  I’ll go to Home Depot and buy a spool of it and braid it into a bracelet.  Well, that sounds like a plan.

Honestly, we live in difficult times.  Just when you think that you’ve conquered the worst problems something new comes along.  Like nose rings.  I was always freaked out when I saw people, especially women with nose rings.  I always wondered if when their nose was running did it drip down the nose ring?  And then I thought maybe that was a workable situation.  When they had a cold, they could attach a length of tubing to the bottom of the nose ring and let the snot run off into a bottle or something.  I thought of patenting this idea but then I figured some nose ring wearer probably already thought of it.  So, I didn’t.

Well, the world marches on.  Alright then, bald headed women.