How to Take a Good Headshot Yourself, With the Camera You Already Have

Written by the BetterPic team. Disclosure: we sell a generated alternative to this. This guide is the version that costs you nothing, because for a lot of people it is the right answer and the honest thing is to say so.

The phone is not the limiting factor. Three other things are, in this order, and none of them costs anything to fix.

One: the lens, not the camera

Use the telephoto lens, not the default wide one. The wide lens distorts faces at portrait distance — it widens the nose and flattens everything — which is why selfies rarely look like you. Tap 2x or 3x and step back until the framing is right.

If you only have one camera, shoot from further away and crop in afterwards. Two metres back and cropped beats half a metre and framed, every single time. This one change fixes more bad headshots than anything else in this guide.

Two: one light source, and only one

Stand facing a window and turn everything else off.

A window a metre in front of you is a large soft source, which is most of what a studio actually sells you. The mistake that ruins the majority of home attempts is not the camera: it is mixing daylight from a window with a tungsten ceiling bulb, which lands two different colour temperatures on the same face and cannot be fixed afterwards. Kill the ceiling light.

Outdoors, overcast is genuinely good rather than a consolation prize. Direct midday sun is the worst light available to you — it puts hard shadows in the eye sockets and under the nose.

Three: height, distance and the timer

Prop the phone at your own eye height and use the timer. Arm's length forces you close, which brings the distortion back, and puts your elbow in the frame. A shelf or a stack of books does the job.

Below eye level looks up your nose. Above it makes you look small. Eye level is not a stylistic preference here, it is the neutral option that does not editorialise about you.

On portrait mode: use it, but check it

It is very good on simple scenes, and it still routinely eats the edges of glasses frames and curly hair — which is exactly where the failure is most visible. Shoot one portrait-mode frame and one normal frame and compare them at full size.

Real distance between you and the background gives you the same separation with none of the artefacts. If you can stand two metres in front of a wall rather than against it, do that instead.

Take far more frames than feels reasonable

Fifty is not excessive. Expression is the hardest variable and it is not something you can hold, so think of something specific and mildly funny a second before the timer fires rather than posing a smile. The difference between a good headshot and an awkward one is almost always expression, not technique.

The step everyone skips

Judge it at thumbnail size, not full screen.

Shrink your best frame to about 50 pixels and put it next to a few other people's. That is where it will actually be seen. A photograph that looks great large can be an unreadable smudge small, and the reason is nearly always that your hair and the background are the same tone. If that happens, changing the background fixes it without reshooting anything.

When this does not work, and what to do instead

Some rooms simply have no decent window, and some people have no second person available to press the shutter. If you have tried the above and the results are still unusable, the constraint is the room rather than you.

At that point a studio is the best result, and a generated set is the cheap one. If you want to test the generated route before paying, there is a free version that produces up to 10 images, and an editor for tidying up a photograph you already have — which is often the better answer if your existing shot is fundamentally fine and just badly framed.

One caveat that applies to every generated tool, ours included: they fail unevenly, and most reliably on strong prescription glasses, tightly curled hair and darker skin tones. If you are in one of those groups, the window and the timer will probably serve you better than any generator.

More from this blog

Business Headshot: What It Has to Do, and What Most of Them Get Wrong

Realtor Headshots: Why the Sign, the Card and the Profile Need Different Files

An index of everything we publish, across every platform, is at the BetterPic index.

Once you have a frame you like, the cropping and background work is the free profile picture editor.