The title almost says it all. This is my 100th blog post since starting my blog earlier this year. To honor that milestone, I took 100 pennies and composed the following photo.

Canon 60D | 18-135mm Lens | 0″4 | f/5.6 | ISO 400 | Tripod

I wish I could say that I had a lot of the steel pennies made in 1943 because of copper shortage in World War II, but that is not the case. I ripped some aluminum foil into small strips and wrapped the pennies in order to make the 100 standout from among the copper-colored pennies.

I took a bazillion photos of the coins, trying to get something that looked interesting. I tried using my 50 mm lens to take some that had a low depth of field, but a depth of field just didn’t seem to make sense for the photo. I tried some shots from directly above the coins. I tried a tight shot and a wide shot. I tried a few different angles. I tried the camera in manual mode and triggering an off-camera flash.

With all the shots I took, this is the one that I feel turned about the best. I adjusted the levels in Photoshop to try and help bring out the 100, without trying to discolor the other copper coins.

One element that I wish I could have gotten to work was lighting the edges of the silver coins using an external flash, which made it look like those coins were backlit. It was a neat effect, but it didn’t come out bright enough to have it work on a large, off-camera screen. But the concept was pretty cool.

Thanks to everyone who’s read my blog, commented on the photos, or even shared a track-back to the blog. It’s been fun, and I hope I can keep the posts coming and share my attempts to try new techniques, styles or effects with my camera.

~signed, Carltonaut