Morgan 1885-O VAM 23 Grade Opinion - New Pics

Grading and coin photography are two things I need to get better at.

I'll post more shortly.

For me, having the light directly above the coin pointing downwards tends to NOT show the lustre. I have mine at a 45 degree angle, and depending on how good the lustre is, sometimes I bend my light almost underneath the coin. A good trick for making the coin the focus of the photo is to balance it on something like a cork. This places the coin in absolute focus whilst blurring the background. Play around with the lighting. I used to use a cheap photography white box that you can get from ebay or Amazon and have two lights shining at 45 degrees to the coin, from outside the box so the harsher light is diffused through the white material. Also, if your light is giving too much washout, you can fix some tissue paper around it. In your first photo, because of the way the light is it makes the coin look AU58 but with the second set of photos you can see that the lustre is good and it won't be an AU58 coin. Pretty sure it's MS but will need better photos to assess, also, the cheek does look polished but that might just be the images.

UNC details cleaned. Visible hairlines on obverse and reverse.