Cookbook Recipes

How to photograph a cookbook page so you can actually use it later

Cookbooks are built to lie flat on a shelf, not beside a hot hob. A few simple habits make a photo clear enough to read in six months.

Cookbooks are built to lie flat on a shelf, not on a counter beside a hot hob, and most of us don't want splashes on a book we paid good money for. Photographing the recipes you plan to cook solves both problems. It only works if the photo is clear enough to read in six months, and a few simple habits get you there.

Lighting and angle

Natural light from a window is the easiest fix. Shadows are the usual problem, and the biggest one is often your own phone and arm falling across the page. Stand so the light comes from the side, and hold the phone directly above the page rather than at an angle, so the text doesn't slant and the lines stay straight.

Glossy paper reflects. If you see a bright patch across the ingredients, tilt the book slightly or move so the window isn't reflecting in it.

Flatten the page

Pages that curve into the spine blur and bend the text near the gutter. Press the book open flat with your hand or a clean, light object at the edge of the frame. If a recipe sits right in the gutter of a thick book, take the photo slightly from above and check that the first and last words of each line are sharp.

Take one set of photos per recipe

Capture everything you need to cook the dish:

• The title and any introduction that mentions timings or tips
• The full ingredient list
• The whole method
• A note of the book and page number

A recipe that runs across a double-page spread needs two photos. Take the second one overlapping the first slightly, so you don't miss a line at the join. Photograph the cover or title page once per book, so you remember where each recipe came from.

Check before you move on

Zoom in on the photo straight away and read it. A thirty-second check beats discovering a blurry quantity when the book has already gone back on the shelf. Retaking one photo costs a few seconds.

A note on sharing

Keeping a photo of a recipe for your own kitchen is one thing. Posting whole pages publicly is another, and authors and publishers tend to care about that. Keep the pages for personal use and share a link or a recommendation when you want others to try a book.

Where mmmiso fits

A cookbook page goes into mmmiso as a photo, and a recipe that runs across a double-page spread can take up to five photos, read in order. Before you save, mmmiso shows you what it read, so the quick zoom-and-check the habits above call for happens right there, and there's a source field for the book title and page number so you can find your way back to the original. One honest limit: mmmiso keeps the recipe as text rather than the photo itself, so the page isn't archived, and each recipe needs its own set of photos. Once it's saved, it's searchable alongside everything else and ready to plan into a week, with no remembering which book and shelf it lived on. If the shelf itself is the problem, beating cookbook shelf guilt is a good next read, and recipes saved from Instagram and everywhere else can live in the same place.