How to take a good picture of a fountain pen nib

If your fountain pen isn't writing well and you'd like help diagnosing the issue a good nib picture is essential.

To start with, here's a bad nib picture. Not only is it too far away the angle isn't good enough to see the tipping as it contacts the page

I'd try and not hold the pen in your hand, get some blu tack and stick the pen in there. It helps if you do this on a light coloured desk for added contrast in the image but some paper in the background works well too. Make sure you have plenty of light and turn on the flash on your phone camera too.

Now we're getting somewhere. You want to take a picture looking across the tipping to see how it contacts the paper, you'll almost always want to use the macro mode on your camera for this. Here are two pictures showing the correct angle, one with macro more and one without

With Macro

Without Macro

And finally, an image straight down the nib will show if it's seated on the feed correctly, again use macro mode

As a bonus tip, if you have a loupe it's possible to hold this in front of your camera lens and take an ultra-magnified picture

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