A shelfie is a photograph of your bookshelf. People post them. You want yours to look good. That is a reasonable thing to want and the answer is mostly light.
Shoot in daylight, near a window, with the window behind you rather than behind the shelf. Turn off the overhead bulb, which will make every spine look yellow and slightly ill. Stand back further than feels right, then take one straight-on shot of the whole unit and one closer shot of a single row, because the close one is almost always the better photo. Straighten the spines so they are flush at the front edge. Take out anything that is not a book: the charger, the mug, the little dish of keys. Take twenty pictures. Keep one.
That is the entire method and it works. Now I will tell you how we do it here, which takes longer, because I am a horse.
I should get that out of the way early so you are not confused later on. I am a horse. I live behind the building, I come in through the wide door by the loading bay, and I do the photography because nobody else volunteered. My typing is slow. Each letter is one hoof, placed carefully, and if I place it wrong I have to start the word again, so this post has taken since roughly noon.
1. Choose your shelf. Not the good shelf. The good shelf photographs like a brochure and nobody believes it. Choose the shelf where the books are the actual ones you read.
2. Remove the non-books. I do this with my mouth, which is why several of our volumes have a soft dent near the top corner. The dent is called provenance and adds value, I have decided.
3. Open the curtain. Wait for the light to come off the lake and land sideways on the spines. This happens for about eleven minutes a day, usually late, and it is worth waiting for. The lake is Doug's. Doug founded this place and is often down there, standing at the edge with his hands in his pockets, being disappointed at the water. He waves if you wave. Do not ask him about the shelfie. He has opinions about the shelfie.
4. Set the camera on the crate. I cannot hold a camera. I have tried and the results were photographs of the ceiling, which we posted anyway and which did fine.
5. Level the shelf using the small brass level Marigold keeps in her cardigan pocket. Marigold has not blinked since the Clinton administration and will not lend you the level, but she will hold it against the shelf herself and tell you the answer, which is always no.
6. Take the photograph.
7. There is hay by the loading bay door.
8. I went to the hay. I want to be honest with you about that. I got to step six, I got the shot, I turned to go back for the second angle, and the wide door was open and the afternoon was warm and there was hay. The hay is not even good hay. It is a bale that came in wrong in June and nobody sent back. But it smells like the field behind my mother's field and I put my whole face in it and stayed there through the eleven minutes of lake light, which is the exact light I told you to wait for, which I then missed.
9. Come back. Take the photograph again, badly, in the wrong light, with a mug in the frame that you forgot to take out at step two. Post that one.
I will mention this because it is the strangest part of my week and nobody in the office will discuss it with me.
They come in through the front, not my door, six or seven an hour some afternoons. They stand in the entry. They look at the ceiling, then at the guestbook, then at their phone, and then at me. Then they say something like this isn't it or I thought there was a login and I nod, because that is a thing I can do, and they leave.
I do not know what they are looking for. I have asked. A woman in a rain jacket told me she was expecting somewhere with giveaways, and I said we have a bale, and she said that was not what she meant. I have started leaving the wide door propped open in case the place they want is on the other side of the building. It is not. It is a paddock. But some of them go out there and stand in it a while, and I think it does them good.
Anyway. Your shelf. If you want to see how the others here handled it, there is a whole basement of this sort of thing in the arcade, where the shelfie machine submits your photograph directly to the Ghost of Mark Twain for comment. He is fair. He is not kind. And if you left something behind on your way through, it is probably in the Lost and Found, along with a lens cap I have been unable to pick up for three years.
Buy a book. Not from me, I have no way to take your money. But from someone. Authors are fragile organisms and the hay is not free.
Slowly,
Booktrovert #7587