On Sunday 16th July 2023, Sophie is giving an online talk on photographing books at a Summer Festival of Books and Writing, detailed on Facebook here. Please add your own to the comments section, below.
Book reviewers and writers need a huge variety of photographs to illustrate blog posts and social media stories. I run informal workshops at conferences to show writers what can be achieved quickly and easily. It’s fun and we’ve had some great results. Many were simple but worked well.
I use a spotlight and various props while authors bring along their books and publications. I help them to dress a shot to inspire reading and we snap away with iPhones, taking shots for summer reading and ‘Ideas for Christmas’.
We feature ebooks on Kindle or open a magazine to showing articles.
Ten tips:
- Always use a spotlight – a desk light will do, or wait for lovely outdoor light.
- Think of who is going to read your book, where, when and why.
- Chose a minor colour used on the cover for your background eg: gold or dark grey. A cashmere pashmina or plaid tablecloth can look good.
- Only use 1, 3 or 5 props with a limited palette of colours. Don’t distract from the book.
- Useful props include sunglasses and a straw hat with a few leaves to suggest summer reading, spectacles and comparison books with a steaming cup of coffee or glass of wine for winter, wrapping paper and ribbon to suggest giving a book as a present. Vintage black and white photos illustrate 20th Century historical fiction well.
- Tap the screen on the spot you need in clear focus, such as the title.
- Frame as closely as you dare. Try to feature the spine.
- When you take portraits of people, animals or birds, compose images with one eye in the centre of the shot.
- If you want a comic shot, cut your subject off at a shoulder joint.
- Play around with the picture until you get it right. Discard any that aren’t perfect.
Take three aspects for each set up: square shots for Instagram, landscape shots for blog posts, Twitter or Facebook and portrait aspect for Facebook or Instagram Stories. Check out publishers’ photos for ideas.
Enjoy yourself. It should be quicker and easier than using Canva or computer generated images but that is fun and you can add graphics:
Sophie Neville won the Create! Prize for Photography in 2020.
Her memoirs include ‘Funnily Enough’ serialized in iBelieve magazine, ‘Ride the Wings of Morning’ and ‘The Making of Swallows and Amazons (1974)’ published by The Lutterworth Press. She is working on two novels set in East Africa, which have been winning writing awards.
originally featured in Christian Writer magazine
Sophie Neville 