Hot Tip: Recipe Photos
With each bespoke cookbook project comes more experience and knowledge on ways to streamline the process for both you and for me. Now that I have several under my belt, I’ve been able to make a list of tips and notes that will not only help the custom process go more smoothly, but save on time by eliminating additional back-and-forth that is often required to gather and confirm information. These tips and tricks may not eliminate all the questions, but by having this information up-front, you will feel more confident in the information you are providing.
The Recipe Gallery is the last section in your cookbook.
Today’s Hot Tip addresses best practices for submitting your recipe photos. Recipe photos are not only used to create your cookbook, but they are also archived in the a section known as The Recipe Gallery. While archiving recipe images is optional, this is a way to ensure that all of the nostalgia around those wonderful recipe cards, your grandmother’s handwriting, and stained papers are preserved for all in the family, and for years to come. So, if you are digitally submitting your recipes, here are a few tips and tricks to ensure a good-looking gallery:
Scanning Preferred
If submitting your recipes digitally, scanning is ideal. Scanning allows for the clearest quality, best resolution, minimal light manipulation, and the easiest cropping (when necessary).
Photography
Taking photos of your own recipes works really well! There are just a few factors to consider when taking your photographs to ensure a clean looking Recipe Gallery. Among them: light, angle, and resolution. A few suggestions below:
A Recipe Gallery excerpt.
You can see that the image to the far left was harder to crop, and thus the brown background shows. If on a white background, it blends in with the paper.The smaller images were taken from a straighter angle, and thus easier to crop.
Lay recipe cards, papers, etc. flat on a solid, white surface. Any solid color will do, but if it is white, it will match the paper of the book which is helpful if a clean crop is unattainable.
Use natural light when taking the photograph. Turn the flash off on your camera, turn off overhead light (if inside), and set-up next to a window that lets in all the sunshine. Better yet, set-up outside. Natural light provides the truest of colors when photographing on your own, without equipment. Please be mindful of casting shadows over your recipes when photographing.
Consider your angle. Your goal is to take a photograph that is as straight-on as possible. To achieve a good angle you can do the following: 1) With your recipe laying flat on a surface, keep your phone/lens completely parallel with the image, pull up about 12” away from the object (distance depends on size of object. This distance works well for a 4x6/5x7 card), allowing negative space around the image for cropping. (2) tack or tape your recipe to a bulletin board or wall, and instead of the “top-down” approach, follow the same distance above, but you’ll be taking the photo “face-to-face.”
High resolution for print. Images for print need to be a minimum of 300dpi. This ensures great print quality. An image on your computer monitor or phone may not look grainy or blurry, but screens do not require a high resolution, therefore an image will still look clear when displayed on your phone or monitor. So please consider this when saving and sending your photos.
When digitally submitting a large group of photos, I recommend sending via DropBox, GoogleDocs, or even an iPhoto shared album works great. Do what works best for you!
“I don’t want to scan or photograph my recipes.” No problem, you are welcome to mail-in or drop-off your recipes, and I am happy to photograph them for you for an additional fee. Please see pricing.
Hope this was a helpful Hot Tip! Please feel free to comment below with any questions or tips on taking photos that work for you.
