Royal Mint - Dinosaur coin
It’s not often you get to spend a night at the museum but when The Royal Mint asked me to come and photograph one of their new coins (and meet the artist who created it) I got that opportunity at the Natural History Museum in London.
The main hall is amazing whenever you visit the museum during the day time even with 100’s of visitors around you but, being there at night, when it is completely empty was even more special. And slightly spooky….
I was only given a few minutes with the artist who designed the coins but I managed to grab some quick portraits of him in the main hall and some shots of him doing some sketches of his designs. Once we had those images in the bag I left him to be interviewed for TV, took a couple of the coins and headed off into the way too dark and quiet museum. It’s amazing how spooky a place can feel when everyone has left.
I wandered off to the dinosaur exhibition for some close ups of the coins looking for anything that was dinosaur related I could put the coin on. It turned out that the animated dinosaur exhibition hadn’t been turned off so there were dinosaur roars echoing around the room adding to the whole surreal experience. I actually jumped when the first dinosaur roared as I walked past it and even after that it was quite unnerving hearing them moving when they were just around the corner and out of sight.
Coins are hard to photograph at the best of times in a studio but take them on location and then try and get them balancing next to fossils was extremely tricky. Obviously there were many parts of the exhibition that I couldn’t access or touch but eventually I found a few places I could carefully balance an expensive 50p coin on.
