How to Photograph an Old Photograph

The photograph you want painted is often a print in an album, a frame, or a shoebox — and there is no scanner in the house. Good news: a modern phone camera, used carefully, will out-resolve most consumer flatbeds. It just has to be used carefully.

Four rules, and the whole job takes ten minutes.

1. Take it out of the frame, if you safely can

Glass reflects everything: you, the window, the ceiling light. If the print slides out easily, take it out. If it is stuck to the glass — which happens with old prints — stop immediately and leave it alone. A photograph fused to glass can be separated, but by a conservator, not by you at the kitchen table.

2. Flat, and lit from the side

Lay the print on a flat surface near a window, out of direct sun. Turn off every lamp in the room; mixed light sources give you an orange half and a blue half. Overcast daylight through a window is the best free light there is.

If the print is curled, weight the corners with something clean and heavy. Books work.

3. Straight overhead, and fill the frame

Hold the phone parallel to the print — not tilted, or the rectangle comes out as a trapezoid — and get close enough that the photograph fills the frame edge to edge. Tap the screen on a face to set focus. Use the main camera, never the digital zoom, and never the flash.

Brace your elbows on the table. Almost every blurry copy we receive is a hand-held shot at an indoor shutter speed.

4. Send the original file

Email and messaging apps compress photos, sometimes brutally. Send the full-size file: use the "actual size" option in mail, a cloud link, or AirDrop. A photo of a photo has already lost one generation of detail. Do not spend a second one on a chat app.

What about the damage?

Cracks, foxing, water stains, a missing corner, the colour shifted to pink — none of that needs fixing before you send it. That is the job, not a problem with your file. Painted Kindred exists for exactly this: cracked, faded and water-damaged family photographs restored and repainted — the wedding party, the crossing, the team, the front porch.

Send the damage. It is often the most informative part of the print, because it tells us what the photograph has survived.

And then put the original back

Photograph it once, put it somewhere dark and dry, and work from the copy. The point of having it painted is that the paint can hang in the light while the original does not have to.