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There is a reason why 90% of the cookbooks FamilyCookbookProject.com prints are submitted in late November and early December. Everyone knows that family cookbook‘s make great Christmas gifts! Everyone wants something personal and special to give to love ones at the holidays and a family cookbook is makes the perfect gift.

Why are we telling you this in July? Well cookbooks don’t just happen by themselves, they need to be have recipes at it, professionally design covers selected and everything proofread before they are submitted for printing.

The time it takes to have your cookbook printed and shipped also more than doubles just before the holidays because of the sheer volume. So now is the time to put your efforts into your cookbook and have it completed and submitted for printing by the time September rolls around.

Bill Rice is Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect and share food memories by creating their own printed personal cookbooks. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest!

How to Take Great Food Photos for Your Recipes
They say a picture is worth a thousand words and with recipes that is especially true.

It’s wonderful to read a list of ingredients and see the potential in a recipe, but to look at the finished product can make your mouth water!

Family Cookbook Project highly recommends adding a photo to every recipe you can in your online cookbook. It helps people to see what to expect when they follow your recipe and gives them a standard to meet when comparing their finished dish to the original.

With the advent of digital camera built into cell phones, you don’t have to be a professional photographer to take good food photos.

Here are some pointers to help improve your recipe photos:

Use Natural Light – Make sure that the light is right – shoot the food either next to a bright window or under a pendant light in the restaurant. Don’t use your camera’s flash! Set your dish near a window and turn off any artificial lights that might be on nearby. Try to photograph with the light at your back or to the side of a dish, so that the shadows are to the side or behind it. 

Hold Still – Taking photos inside, even with ample natural light, often means you have to hold the camera very still to keep it from registering hand shake. If you have a tripod, that’s ideal. If you don’t, you can duplicate the tripod effect by resting your elbows on the table or counter and using them to stabilize the camera. Moving the camera when taking a photo will only lead to blurry unusable photos. 

Get close to the food! – Don’t stand back three feet and get the food with the stove, the dirty dishes, and all the condiments around it. Move in and get up close and personal, and let the pan…or the plate…or the cutting board fill the frame.  

Stage the shot – The food isn’t the only thing in the photo. Using plates, silverware and linens in complementary colors can help your dish come alive. Shoot food on a beautiful plate or on a table with texture and character. The more appetizing the ingredients, the better your photo will be. Plates that contain colored vegetables and/or meat, preferably in light-colored sauces, are often the most appealing to the eye in photos. Also Don’t be Afraid of a mess. A few crumbs or a smear of dressing can be beautiful, if you let them. 

Focus on the food –  If you are using a DSLR, stop down your lens to f/1.8 or f/2.0 that limits your depth of field to one part of the image only, blurring out everything around the subject, simulating a shot taken with a macro lens. If you are using an iPhone, there are apps, such as Camera+ or VSCO Cam, that will create the same effect. Remember, you want the food to be the main focus, not the background. 

Try different angles –  Get up over the food and shoot straight down on it. When shooting overheads, if appropriate, try filling up the frame with what’s already on the table such as cups, wine glasses, utensils and moving hands. You can also  think in three dimensions, You might not usually serve brownies piled in a vertical column, but stacking any flat food, like pancakes, cookies, or even onion rings, is a great way to show off texture and make the photo more appealing. You can also add dimension to your food photos by showing the dish right after the that first bite is taken, or the second and third. These are little details that make a viewer feel like they’ve sat down and are enjoying the meal. 

Get Close to Ugly Foods  – Some foods, no matter how good they taste, just don’t make good photos. But the closer you get to your subject, the more the visual story becomes about texture and color, rather than pure mouth-watering beauty. Avoid foods that are white and gloppy, such as congealed gravy on white pasty mashed potatoes. 

Size Matters –  Make sure your camera settings are set for a good sized photo. Small photos look blurry when they are enlarged on line. A photo viewed online only has to be 72 dpi (dots per inch, the measure for quality), but if you are going to print your photo, you want it to be at least 300 dpi. 600 pixels wide (a measurement for size) is a good target for minimum photo size.

Using other’s photos – It is important to note that the Internet makes it easy to find photos of recipes already taken. While this might be much easier, the photo still is the property of whomever holds the rights. Don’t always assume that because a photo is on the Internet you can simply use it for your recipe. Make sure you ask permission from the owner before you use it.

Bill Rice takes more than 20,000 photos a year and is Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect and share food memories. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest!

At Family Cookbook Project, we have been helping people create custom cookbooks for more than 15 years. We have learned a lot in that time and we wanted to point out some of the things not to do to make your personal cookbook a success.

Mistake #1 -Thinking that everyone in the family will be interested in participating. While it is always a good thing to invite as many people as possible to contribute to your family cookbook, expecting everyone to participate is simply unrealistic. There’s a lot of people in every family that just don’t like to cook, think they are too busy or simply forget and miss the deadline.

It’s important that once you invite your contributors that you keep them motivated by sending messages using family cookbook project reminder tool on a regular basis. You also can have them contacted when new recipes are added to the cookbook.

Mistake #2 – Making the One Final Perfect Family Cookbook. let’s face it, family cookbooks are living documents that are currently evolving just like the families themselves. my family is already on its third volume of recipes. A lot of people also add and use recipes online.

So the bottom line is don’t hold up the entire cookbook waiting for one or two specific recipes or contributors.

Mistake #3 – Making the Family Recipe Book Only About Recipes. Sure the cookbook will have great recipes, however what people really like to read are the personal notes about the recipes and why they are important to the people who contributed them. Family photos are another great way to make your cookbook truly your family cookbook.

Mistake #4 – Bad Proof Reading. One of the most important jobs as editor is reading all of the recipes activate been submitted to make sure the format is consistent and any miss spelled words are corrected.

Luckily Family Cookbook Project has created an “editor edit mode” which allows you to go through each recipe and make changes to them quickly and efficiently. You browser’s spell check will also point out questionably spelled words.

We would add a fifth mistake – not using Family Cookbook Project to organize and print your family cookbook!

Bill Rice is Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect, preserve and share food memories by creating their own printed personal cookbooks. He is the author of The Wellfleet Oyster Cookbook (Available on Amazon) and the Cape Cod Cocktail Cookbook, both created using FamilyCookbookProject.com. He is also editor of the Donovan Family Cookbook, now it’s third printing.

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Creating the perfect family cookbook is not happen overnight. It takes commitment, organization, and lots of photos and recipes to create a treasured keepsake that will last generations. Staying motivated is one of the toughest things about any long-term project like creating a cookbook.

Sometimes life gets in the way of our best intentions. We have other obligations to fulfill that make your initial expectations extend out longer than expected.

Here are some of the things you can try when your cookbook seems to be stuck in neutral.

Don’t try to do it all yourself – FamilyCookbookProject.com has a built-in tool to invite other family members to contribute recipes to your cookbook. Having additional people to add recipes makes the work go faster.

Add a co-editor – sometimes sharing the work means getting someone else to review the recipes and check for typos. This is a time consuming task that maybe you can assign to someone else in the family.

Keep it simple – FamilyCookbookProject.com has powerful tools to allow you to personalize your family cookbook in almost any way you can imagine. However you don’t have to use them all. I consider using one of our professionally designed cookbook covers rather than creating your own. Using standard recipe layouts also can save time and energy.

Make a To do list – it’s always best if you know what tasks have to be completed in order to finish your cookbook. Take a look at the blog post 7 Steps to Create a Perfect Family Cookbook to see all the steps and know what still has to be done.

Scale back expectations – sometimes our vision for our family cookbook does not meet the reality of what the publishing system will allow. Be flexible enough to reset your expectations of what you want your cookbook to look like in order to keep the project moving forward.

Bill Rice is Co-Publisher of the Great Family Cookbook Project, a website that helps families and individuals collect and share food memories by creating their own printed personal cookbooks. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest!