How to photograph a goshuin: light, angle and framing for a photo you can still read later

This article covers only how to photograph the goshuin you received so the photo works as a record later. Whether you may take photographs on the grounds or at the office is each shrine's or temple's own decision, and this article does not go into it. How to think about what is all right to photograph is in "Photographing a goshuin: how far is all right?".

What does a goshuin photo for your record need to show?

A photo for your record needs three things you can zoom in on and read later: the name of the shrine or temple, the visit date and the seal. It does not need to look good. If you can look back at the photo and tell where and when the goshuin was from, it is enough material for a record.

So the unit you photograph is one page at a time (for a spread, the whole spread). Open the book wide and shoot several pages together, and the characters of each one come out small and the date line becomes unreadable. With one goshuin in each photo, photos and records match one to one, and you will not get lost when you put them in order later.

When is the best time to photograph it?

The easiest time is on the day of the visit, once you are home. The reason is the capture date the photo keeps.

A photo carries the date and time it was taken (this is the EXIF — the information the camera writes into the photo itself, such as when it was taken and on what device). Photograph a goshuin on the day of the visit and that capture date becomes a clue to the visit date as it stands, which saves you checking the date later. Photograph it days afterwards and the capture date and the visit date drift apart, and you end up going through the dates written on the goshuin one by one to correct them.

It is fine to wait until you have reached somewhere you can open the book out calmly. There is no need to stop in front of the office to take the photograph. Photographing it the moment it is handed to you counts as photographing on the grounds, and it gets in the way of the people queuing behind you.

How should the light fall? Avoiding glare and shadow

Photograph it in soft light by a window, without the flash. When the characters in a goshuin photo cannot be read, glare or shadow is usually why.

• Leave the flash off. The sheen of the ink, and characters in gold ink or stamped in gold leaf, throw strong light from the front straight back. A patch that blows out white does not bring the characters back, however you adjust it afterwards.
• Do not shoot under a light directly overhead. Lean over the book right under a ceiling light and the shadow of your phone and hand lands squarely on the page. Do not stand with the light behind you; put the book where the light comes in from an angle.
• Avoid direct sunlight. By a window on a sunny day, light filtered through a lace curtain or similar is the easiest to work with, and the vermilion comes out close to how it looks. Under warm-white lighting, the vermilion can come out yellowish.
• Take a kakioki sheet out of its sleeve. Photograph it still inside a clear sleeve or holder and the glare on the surface hides the characters.

What angle and framing? From straight above, one page filling the screen

Lay the book flat on a table and photograph it from directly above, with the phone parallel to the page. Shoot at an angle and the page distorts into a trapezoid, squeezing the characters at the far end small.

• Get all four corners of the page in. The visit date is often written close to the edge of the page. With all four corners in the frame, the date line never gets cut off.
• Keep the margins small and fill the screen. The more of the table that shows around the page, the smaller the characters of the goshuin become. Some record apps scale a photo down when they save it, and the app I am building stores photos at about 2,048px on the long edge. Fill the screen with the page and the kanji numerals of the date stay legible even after scaling down.
• Focus on the date line. Tap the screen lightly around the date and the focus goes there. The thin characters of the date blur more easily than the large brushwork of the name.
• Move closer instead of zooming. Spreading your fingers on the screen to zoom in lowers the image quality. Bring the phone itself closer to the book.

How do you photograph spreads, accordion books and kakioki sheets?

The more a goshuin differs in shape, the more it helps to have decided how to photograph it in advance. Here are the common situations, what tends to go wrong and what to do about it.

How many entries and pages a spread counts as in your record is covered in the article on organising the photos you have piled up, under how to count spreads and several goshuin received together. Why a kakioki is handed over on paper, and what to do with it once you have it, is in "Why your goshuin came on a loose sheet of paper".

What to check right after you take it

Straight after taking it, zoom in on the photo and check three things: the date line, the four corners of the page, and glare. Retaking is never easier than now, while the book is still open in front of you.

1. Can you read the date line? Check that you can zoom in and read the era, the year, and the kanji numerals of the month and day. When the cursive form of an era is hard to read, how to tell the five eras apart and read a date in kanji numerals will help.
2. Are all four corners of the page in? Check that no characters at the edge are cut off.
3. Is there glare or shadow over the characters? Check that no characters fall in a patch that has blown out white or sunk into dark.

When you have taken several photos of the same goshuin, use only the single most legible one for the record. Use both and the same goshuin becomes two entries.

Treat photos for your record and photos for social media separately

A photo for your record is for reading, a photo for social media is for showing, and they call for different ways of shooting. Try to make one photo do both and it tends to do neither well.

For the record, photograph the whole page from straight above, without dressing it up. For social media, framing and background are up to you, but before that, check what the shrine or temple that gave it to you says about posting. Some ask visitors to refrain. Even where posting is fine, watch out for the capture location left in the photo and for any handwritten notes caught in the frame. What to take out before you show anyone is covered in a separate article.

Turning the photos you have taken into a record

Settle the visit dates of the photos you have taken, then put them in order by book and page, and you have one book's worth of ledger. How to clear a pile of photos in three stages — gather them, settle the visit dates, place them into books and pages — is in "Goshuin photos piled up on your phone: how to organise them into a record afterwards".

The app I am building, Goshuin Ledger, turns those three stages directly into operations. Pick several photos from your photo library and they line up in a list with the capture date as the starting visit date; you correct it while looking at the Japanese era date written on the goshuin, and add them to a book and its pages. Photograph them the way this article describes and the starting date will often be right, leaving fewer to correct. What happens between picking the photos and seeing the records line up is written out in order in a separate article.

The first book records as many entries as you like without a purchase, and imported photos can be added to a book one at a time without a purchase. A second book and beyond, and adding two or more imported photos to a book at once, come with the one-time Ledger Full. The App Store shows the current price. What the purchase covers is set out in the pricing section.

When a photo you already took is hard to read

Do not force an unreadable photo into use; open the book and take it again. The capture date of a retaken photo is the day you retook it, so enter the visit date from the date written on the goshuin.

If you end up retaking a whole book, shoot it in order from the first page, and the order of the photos becomes the order of the pages in the book, which saves you arranging them later. For a goshuin that carries no date, tracing the visit date from the capture date and the photos either side narrows it down.

Photographing and recording are both work you do after the visit, so that you can trace back to that day later. The book itself remains the source of the record, so once you have finished photographing, put it back away with care.