This post has one basic goal: to teach you how to take appropriate pictures of the tongue or lip to help others evaluate your baby from a distance.

1) taking good pictures requires 2 people. A tongue selfie does no one any good. One person lifts the lip or the tongue and the other snaps the picture.

2) get good illumination - a decent LED headlight now costs less than $20.

3) Proper positioning - the lip and the tongue should move up for normal breastfeeding. Getting your fingers under the lip or under the tongue is important for testing if you can easily pick the tongue up. Position yourself from above so that the baby's feet are moving away from you.

4) Here’s a video on how to elevate the lip or the tongue: https://vimeo.com/

5) For the person taking the picture, make sure you position yourself so you can bring the entire frenulum in view. One trick is to have the focus already set by focusing on the mouth before you do the elevation. On iPhones (and possibly Android phones), holding your finger on the desired area of focus for several seconds will result in a locked “autofocus/autoexposure”, so that it won’t try to refocus as the baby moves. Another trick is to just hold the shutter down and take a rapid burst of photos to see if you can find a suitable picture. Along similar lines, you could take a video and then choose a screen shot later.