I haven’t had a lot of success taking photos of coins with the otherwise terrific old iPhone camera, with the images coming out distorted in one way or another, or at least bad looking. Today I had a slap-my-forehead moment: I’ve been doing it wrong. The thing to do is take group shots.

Such as group shots from the five-pound box of foreign cheapies, that is. Many of which have long ceased to be legal tender in their countries of origin.

The shiny one with a hole in the center is a Japanese five-yen coin, my favorite among the pocket change of Japan when I lived there. Brass. Roughly the equivalent of a U.S. five-cent coin, so they didn’t have much monetary value, even in the 1990s. But they were good-looking coins when new. Even when older and dull yellow, there was a charm of that hole.

The 50-yen coin had a hole was well, but it was a wafer of cupronickle, which might be sturdy material for circulating coins and all-around useful alloy, it doesn’t have the luster of gold or silver, or the shine of copper or brass.