Part 04 · The craft · Before you shoot

The pre-flight checklist

Four seconds, and it accounts for most of the difference.

Before you tap the shutter

Four-second check

Lens wiped clean
Window light, overhead light off
My own shadow out of the frame
No white glare on the important part
Everything that matters inside the edges
Text readable at this distance
Phone parallel to a flat subject
Am I actually still

If four of these are yes, take the photo. If the first two are no, fix those first.

4.05.1

Phone camera basics

Clean the lens. Your phone lives in a pocket. Ten seconds with a t-shirt is the highest-return habit here.
Tap the thing you care about. That tells the camera what to focus on and expose for. Tap the label, not the background.
Hold still, and breathe out. Most blurry photos are hand shake in dim light.
Use the main lens. Ultra-wide distorts at the edges and is worse in low light.
Use the timer for anything overhead, so the shutter fires after your hand has stopped moving.

4.05.2

When to take more than one

A recipe over two pages, a long receipt, a deep pantry shelf, a packed fridge, a faded recipe card, or a label wrapped round a bottle. iWhisk expects this: it offers Scan another location straight after saving, and receipt capture accepts up to 10 pages at once.

What not to do is take five photos of the same shelf hoping one works. Fix the light and take one good one.