How to Photograph Handmade Books

Simple Tips for Beautiful Book Photos

You’ve spent hours choosing papers, stitching the binding, adding texture, and getting all those little details just right. Then comes the surprisingly tricky part: photographing your handmade book so it looks as good in the photo as it does in real life.

The good news? You don’t need a fancy studio or expensive photography equipment to take beautiful photos of your handmade books.

Whether you’re sharing your work on Instagram, adding photos to your website, entering an exhibition, or simply documenting the books you make, a few simple photography techniques can make a huge difference.

Here’s how I photograph handmade books using natural light, a simple background, and either a camera or phone.

1. Start With Natural Light

Good lighting is probably the most important part of photographing handmade books.

Whenever possible, I use natural daylight from a nearby window. The key is to position the book so the light is coming from the side rather than placing the book directly in front of the window.

Side lighting helps show off all the things we love about handmade books: the texture of the paper, raised stitching, layers, folds, and dimensional details.

Bright, overcast days are especially lovely for photography because the light is soft and even. Strong direct sunlight can create harsh shadows and blown-out highlights.

If the sunlight coming through your window is too strong, try softening it with a sheer curtain.

Quick tip: Turn off overhead lights while you’re photographing. Mixing warm indoor lighting with cool daylight can create strange color casts that are difficult to correct later.

2. Keep the Background Simple

Your handmade book should be the star of the photograph.

For clean, simple images, I often use a large piece of white paper or poster board as the background. You can allow the paper to curve gently upward behind the book to create a seamless backdrop without a visible line where the table meets the wall.

But white isn’t your only option.

Depending on the style of the book, you could also experiment with:

• neutral linen or fabric
• kraft paper
• handmade paper
• a simple wood surface
• a neutral tabletop

Try to choose a background that complements the book without competing with it.

If your book already contains lots of color, pattern, stitching, or collage, a quieter background will usually photograph best.

3. Use a Tripod When You Can

A tripod is one of my favorite tools for photographing handmade books.

It keeps the camera or phone steady, which means sharper photos, especially when you’re taking close-ups of stitching, texture, or small details.

A tripod also makes it much easier to photograph several books from the exact same angle. That’s especially helpful if you’re creating images for a website, online shop, blog post, or social media series and want everything to feel consistent.

If you’re photographing with your phone, you don’t need anything complicated. An inexpensive phone tripod or phone mount works perfectly well.

And if you don’t have a tripod? Prop your phone against something sturdy or steady your elbows against the table. Use what you have.

4. Your Phone Is Probably All You Need

You absolutely do not need a professional camera to take beautiful photographs of handmade books.

Modern phone cameras are incredibly capable, especially when they’re paired with good natural light.

A DSLR or mirrorless camera gives you more control over things like aperture, shutter speed, and depth of field, but for everyday photos, social media, and even many website images, your phone may be all you need.

Before photographing, take a second to clean your camera lens. It sounds ridiculously simple, but fingerprints and dust can make phone photos look surprisingly hazy.

Then tap on the book on your screen to set the focus and adjust the exposure if necessary.

5. Photograph More Than Just the Cover

One of the easiest ways to make your handmade book photography more interesting is to vary your angles.

When I photograph a book, I usually take several different types of shots rather than trying to capture everything in one image.

Here are some of my favorites:

The Straight-Down Shot

Place the closed book flat on the surface and photograph it from directly above.

This works beautifully for showing the overall design of the cover.

The Open Book

Photograph the book lying open so viewers can see the pages, illustrations, collage, journaling, or interior structure.

The Standing Book

Open the book and allow it to stand upright.

This is especially useful for accordion books, sculptural structures, and bindings that deserve to be seen in three dimensions.

The Spine Shot

Get down low and photograph the spine.

If your book has exposed stitching, decorative sewing, cords, ribbons, or an interesting binding structure, this is often one of the most beautiful photographs you can take.

The Detail Shot

Move closer.

Photograph the torn edge of a handmade paper, a cluster of stitches, a button closure, layered collage, printing, embroidery, or another small detail.

These close-up images help people appreciate the craftsmanship that can be difficult to see in a wider photograph.

The Styled Shot

Add a few carefully chosen tools or materials around the book.

You might include:

• thread
• scissors
• bone folders
• awls
• scraps of paper
• brushes
• fabric
• bookbinding tools

A few props can help tell the story of how the book was made. Just don’t add so many that the photograph becomes cluttered.

The Group Shot

If you’ve made several books using the same binding or collection of materials, photograph them together.

Group photographs are especially good for showing variations on a structure and can make beautiful social media images.

6. Photograph the Details That Make Handmade Books Special

When you’re behind the camera, think about what another book artist would want to inspect if they were holding the book in their hands.

Maybe it’s the way the spine is stitched.

Maybe it’s deckled paper edges, layers of paint, handmade marks, embroidery, an unusual closure, or the way the book opens.

Those details are often what make handmade books so compelling.

Don’t just photograph the finished object. Photograph the evidence of the hand that made it.

7. Take More Photos Than You Think You Need

Once you’ve set everything up, take plenty of photos.

Move slightly closer.

Step back.

Turn the book.

Open it to another page.

Photograph the stitching.

Try another angle.

It is much easier to take ten extra photographs while your setup is ready than to recreate everything later because you realize you never photographed the spine.

For every handmade book, I like to capture at least:

• one full closed-book image
• one open-book image
• one spine or binding image
• one close-up detail
• one dimensional or angled shot

That gives you plenty of options for your blog, website, Instagram posts, Reels covers, newsletters, or project galleries.

8. Edit Lightly

My goal with editing isn’t to dramatically change the photograph. It’s to make the image look more like the book does in real life.

I usually make small adjustments to things like:

• exposure
• brightness
• white balance
• contrast
• shadows
• sharpness
• cropping

Pay particular attention to color. Paper has so many subtle tones, and you don’t want a beautiful cream handmade paper suddenly looking yellow or blue because of the lighting.

You can edit with your phone’s built-in photo tools or use apps such as Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop Express. Canva is also useful when you need to resize an image, add text, or create graphics for social media.

The best editing is often the editing you barely notice.

9. Think About Where the Photo Will Be Used

Before you finish photographing your book, think about where you plan to share the images.

For a blog or website, horizontal photographs can be useful.

For Instagram posts, square or vertical compositions often give you more flexibility.

For Pinterest, Stories, and Reels, vertical images are especially helpful.

You don’t necessarily need to photograph the book from scratch for every platform. Simply leave a little extra space around your composition so you have room to crop the image in different ways later.

You Don’t Need a Photography Studio

The setup behind a beautiful book photograph is often much less glamorous than the finished image suggests.

A window.

A piece of paper.

A phone.

Maybe a tripod.

That’s really enough.

Rather than worrying about having the perfect equipment, concentrate on soft light, a simple background, sharp focus, and showing your book from several different perspectives.

Most importantly, photograph the things that make your book worth looking at—the stitching, textures, materials, pages, imperfections, and tiny handmade details.

Those are the things that tell its story.

And once you start paying attention to those details through the camera, you may find yourself seeing your own handmade books a little differently, too.

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