Take great photos of creations

Four things that do most of the work

Get near a window

Daylight is the whole trick. A window on a cloudy day is the best light in the house, and it costs nothing. Overhead bulbs on their own turn white paper yellow and flatten every color underneath.

Watch for your own shadow. If you lean over the drawing to take the photo, you are standing between it and the light. Step to the side.

Lay it flat

Floor, table, or taped to a wall. Then hold the phone straight above it rather than off to one side, so the square page stays a square page. Photograph a drawing at an angle and the far edge shrinks.

For a sculpture or a model or a painted box, take the one angle that looks most like it does in real life. That is usually the one they hand it to you at.

Let it fill the screen

Move in until the creation takes up most of the frame, with a little room around the edges. A drawing floating in the middle of your kitchen table is a photo of your table.

Both hands

Blur is almost always the phone moving, not the camera. Two hands, elbows in, and a breath before you tap. Or prop the phone on a stack of books and let it sit still.

The camera helps you out

Open the camera in Little Binder and there is guidance right on the viewfinder:

• Corner brackets mark where the creation should sit. Get it inside those and the framing is done.
• A soft grid gives you something to line the edges of the paper up against, which is easier than eyeballing straight.
• A hint that changes every few seconds, cycling through fill the frame, find good light, hold steady. It is there for children taking their own photos, and it is a decent nudge for grown-ups too.

Then you get a preview. Look at it before tapping Use this one!: is it sharp, is the whole thing in there, can you read the small parts. If not, Try again is right there and nobody minds.

You can fix things afterwards

The next step lets you crop, turn, and straighten, so a slightly crooked photo is not worth reshooting. Skip it when the photo is already fine. What the app cannot do is add back detail that was too dark or too blurry to capture, which is why the four habits above are worth the ten seconds.

After that comes the voice note. That is the part you will actually replay in ten years.

Doing a whole stack at once

Digitizing a backlog for Add many at once is a different job. Set up once and stay there:

• One spot, one light. Pick your window, clear a patch of floor or table, and do not move. Every photo comes out looking like it belongs with the others.
• Plain surface underneath. A white sheet or a piece of poster board. Wood grain and tablecloths pull the eye off the drawing.
• Two piles, done and to do. Sounds obvious. It is the thing that keeps you from photographing the same drawing twice or missing one entirely.
• Glance at the last few every so often. Phones drift out of focus. Better to catch it after five than after fifty.
• Keep the paper. The photo is the backup, not the replacement. If an original ever gets lost or ruined, the image is safe and you can print a fresh copy at home.