Collection Highlights - Provident Metals Prospector Series: Pony Express

Back with the third round in the provident metals prospector series, this one features the pony Express. It continues on the trend of highlighting some of the iconic careers and figures of the time. First to prospector, then the gunslinger, third would probably be the pony Express delivering the mail and wild west. There were a couple of great movies and TV shows growing up that was all about the pony Express so I think this is very fitting.

Collection Highlights - Third design in the Provident Prospector Series

Obverse

In front of the coin has a great image of a young pony Express writer driving his horse hard sprinting across landscape to deliver the mail. My guess is he either needs to beat the train to the depot to deliver the mail, or he has just picked the mail up and is off to the next place. Either way I personally think this is one of my better photographs of the coins and for some reason the lighting worked perfectly to really show off some of the depths of the design and create some nice shadow in there. I wish I could recreate this every time as I think that's what a silver coin should look like. If you look off in the distance behind the pony rider you'll notice there's two other riders on horses always back. I don't know if they're just in the background, giving Chase trying to steal the mail and money, or if they would be writers who just handed me off

Reverse

I know there's not much to say about the reverse at this point since we have already covered it two times. About the only thing I can say is this photo is clearly that is good his previous one. I don't think it focused quite as well on the entire coin. Appears to be more focused up on the upper lettering and maybe the word hotel but it got a little blurry on me and the lower half. I take everything with my phone, and holding my hands so it's not exactly like I'm a professional but I would like to take more consistent photos. I will say I'm off topic from the silver coin that the only way I've ever been able to take a good photo of a silver coin is to have a black fleece background. For some reason having that entire black background helps the camera focus in a coin and not make the entire thing so bleached out. I also only take photos now with light coming in from the window. I haven't tried taking it back outside sometimes I feel like I get too overexposed

Double the fun!

I also found two of these. Apparently when I was still buying the series even though they were going up in price, I was buying at least two of the coins. I wasn't sure if I was going to be flipping them or if I was going to try to complete a couple of series. At one point I started buying two of everything to make candy net down to my kids easier but give up on that. Funny thing to me is if I look at this image of the two coins side by side I see a lot more detail in a horse on the right then I doing the left. I think that's just how much difference the lighting plays I see extra details and the muscles of the horse and I think that's a much better shot. It's either that or the coin on the right was one of the first prices, and the coin in the left was later pressed for some of the detail got removed from the dies.