Photographing open books

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Photographing open books

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1HuxleyTheCat
set. 15, 2015, 8:34 am

The biggest problem I seem to have when trying to take images of books (apart from finding suitable levels of natural light), is keeping the book open and the pages flat. Any advice or tips?

2PossMan
set. 15, 2015, 2:21 pm

Perhaps put a heavy object at the corners and then get rid of them in Photoshop or whatever? Not sure what it's called but the "content aware" select, then SHIFT F5 works really well for me.

3HuxleyTheCat
set. 15, 2015, 3:05 pm

>2 PossMan: Thanks for the response. I usually photograph my books in my hallway as that has most natural light, but I still find it a bit on the dark side unless it's a rare sunny day in high summer: consequently, I use a book-stand / lecturn, that I have made from a music stand, to hold the book almost vertical, so the heavy object approach isn't going to work for me. I'm not a Photoshop user either - my workflow stops with Lightroom.

4elenchus
set. 15, 2015, 3:18 pm

>3 HuxleyTheCat:

Your approach reminds me of how I used to use a reading stand: it was much like a fancy music stand. I'd prop open the book I was reading, leaving my lap for taking notes. In grad school, notes and outlines were a must.

I used an elastic band to keep the book pages from turning, as well as to keep the book from slipping from the reading stand. I arranged the elastic over the uppermost section of the page, allowing me to tug out the page and turn it easily, without having to rearrange the elastic each time.

Not sure the elastic could be cropped out easily. If not, you could put the top page over the elastic, with the elastic running vertically (and perhaps use one piece per leaf), so it's not in the image except above and below the book.

5HuxleyTheCat
set. 15, 2015, 4:07 pm

>4 elenchus: That might work for me: thanks, I'll try it out over the weekend.

To make my reading stand, I just took a music stand, removed the music holder and replaced it with a lecturn which I'm made from two pieces of plywood and covered with leatherette. I then added a couple of pieces of finger-shaped and sanded wood to the foot of the L to act as page holders: it works very well for its intended purpose of holding oversized books for reading, but for that the pages don't have to be completely flat.

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