How to Take Dynamic Self-portraits at Home, Using an iPhone
By: Mitchell Ferrin
Tags: Portraits, iPhone, Selfie, Self Portrait, Photography

I’m not saying that these pictures are great; I’ll let you decide this. I’m also not saying that I look great in these pictures; this is not the point. I am saying, though, that I think these pictures are good. And I think they’re good because I’ve adhered to principles that have enabled them to be so, as well as developed reliable techniques for achieving certain effects with editing, all of which I’d like to share with you in this article.

Maybe you need to update your profile picture; maybe you want to document changes to your face over time; maybe you need to shoot a book cover or an album cover, but your budget won’t cover studio photography; maybe you’ve been asked to speak at an event and you need to supply the event planners with a portrait of yourself to use for marketing, and they want the portrait by tomorrow; or maybe you just want to improve your selfie game — whatever the reason, taking good pictures of yourself is a useful skill to develop. And, as I’ve learned over the past few weeks, you can develop this skill at home, with tools that are already available to you.

Principles

⏩ What you put into your camera will be qualitatively proportional to what you get out of it, so employ principles to reliably capture great images. The purpose of a selfie is to show yourself to other people, so relax, capture moments that display your personality, and direct the viewer’s attention to your face.

Although it is possible to improve any photo with editing, it is impossible to improve any photo to such a degree that a bad photo becomes good or a good photo becomes great (unless you’re really good at editing and have tons of time); the ultimate quality of a photo is determined primarily by the light that passes through the aperture of the lens and hits the camera’s sensor at the time of taking the photo. In other words, the ultimate quality of your selfies will be determined when you take them, not afterward; indeed, what you put into your camera will be qualitatively proportional to what you get out of it.

And the reasons for this are simple if not obvious: first, because a house with a faulty foundation will invariably crumble; and second, because the point of editing images after taking them is, not to alter the images, but to enhance them — to minimize their weaknesses and maximize their strengths. Thus, if the initial ratio of strengths to weaknesses favors weaknesses, then your selfies will be net weak no matter how much you bring out their strengths.

And this is where the term dynamic becomes relevant. Dynamic refers both to contrast and variation as well as to application. A dynamic selfie is one that leverages principles of photography to create a compelling image, as well as one that can be used in — or manipulated so as to be used in — multiple contexts. Thus, the following principles will enable you to take dynamic selfies — and to do so reliably, such that you get good, usable images every time you shoot.

Start with Why

The purpose of a photograph is, fundamentally, to communicate, or to transmit information. Thus, the subject of a photograph is always that which the photographer wishes to communicate to viewers. A meal, a product, a person, a situation, a landscape — all of these are captured by the photographer with the intention, not merely of printing, posting, or publishing, but of showing other people. “Look!” the photographer says with every frame.

For selfies, then, the subject is always yourself, and the intention is always to show yourself to other people. (If you’re like me, you may be more interested in lighting and colors and composition, but consider that I nevertheless just showed you a bunch of pictures of myself.) Thus, your goal as a selfie photographer should be twofold: first, to present yourself in a way that accurately (or, at least, adequately) conveys your personality; and second, to direct all attention to your face.

Convey Your Personality

The best photographs tend to be those of moments, or spontaneity; in such photographs, subjects are relaxed and honest. Thus, the best photographers tend to be those who capture moments. This is why, for example, many studio photographers play music during photoshoots, or why many models request it; the music enables both the photographers and the models to be loose — to move — which looseness enables them to produce and capture moments.

So relax, move, and seek to capture moments, as this will ensure that the light that reaches the sensor inside your phone’s camera contains, as it were, your DNA, and that the image that the light produces is representative, not of your poses, but of your personality. If the goal of selfie photography is to communicate yourself to other people (and not simply to look good in their messages or on their feeds), then be yourself, and simply capture moments of yourself being yourself.

Direct Attention to Your Face

Effective photographs are those of a single, clear subject. In writing, what matters most is the main idea; in music, what matters most is the lead vocal; and in photography, what matters most is the subject. All other elements of composition serve to support, elevate, and enhance the main element, which element, in the case of self-portraiture, is yourself.

So your task as a selfie photographer is to direct the viewer’s attention to yourself. And you can do this, above all, by making yourself the largest object in the frame. This will draw attention to you as the subject, as it will place you “closest” to the viewer.

But the part of yourself that is most important in a selfie is your face. So in addition to directing the viewer’s attention to yourself, your task is to direct the viewer’s attention to your face. And although there are many ways to do this, I’ve distilled these ways into three, the combining of which is most effective: with composition, with contrast, and with clarity.

Composition refers to the organization of elements within a frame. This includes placement and relative sizes of objects.

refers to the organization of elements within a frame. This includes placement and relative sizes of objects. Contrast refers to the dynamic range of attributes such as light and color (and texture). This includes the amount of light as well as hue, saturation, and brightness.

refers to the dynamic range of attributes such as light and color (and texture). This includes the amount of light as well as hue, saturation, and brightness. Clarity refers to depth and detail. This includes sharpness, definition, and focal length (depth of field).

We (humans) perceive the world subjectively (duh), and we receive cues from our environments that enable us to distinguish between objects, thus enabling us to orient ourselves both in space generally and in relation to other objects specifically. Objects in the world are larger, brighter, sharper, more saturated, more contrasted, and more detailed the closer they are to us, and, for obvious reasons, we tend to pay attention to things that are closer to us than we do to things that are further away from us. Thus, if you place yourself close to your camera — close to your viewer — you will likely be the thing in your photo that is largest, brightest, sharpest, most saturated, most contrasted, and most detailed, and will consequently receive the most attention from your viewer.

But this is not always the case for your face. As an example (sort of), let’s look at the following image of a canyon in the Rocky Mountains.

Photo by John Ferrin

The objects closer to the camera (the trees and rocks in the foreground) are larger, brighter, sharper, more saturated, more contrasted, and more detailed than the objects that are further away. And this is because of perspective as well as particles in the atmosphere that are interacting and interfering with light as it bounces around the canyon, thus muting objects as they move into the distance. However, these closer objects do not receive the most attention from the viewer — at least, not from me. And this is likely because of their size relative to the frame: they take up only about a fourth of the image, thus reducing their precedence.

So where does my eye (and my attention) go instead? Probably the same place as yours: first to that orange sky, then to the peak beneath it, and then, finally, to the lakes — those two specks of orange — in the middle of the image. But why the lakes, if these are further away from us, lack detail, and are desaturated?

Three reasons: first, because the composition of the image is such that the lakes are in the middle of the image (which is also the largest section of the image), and they are surrounded by hills, the slopes of which create lines that guide the eye to them; second, because the contrast between the bright orange color of the lakes and the muted blues, purples, and grays of the terrain is strong and interesting, as is the contrast between the texture of the lakes (smooth and shiny) and the texture of the terrain (rough and matte); and third, because the lakes are sharp and clear.

You can use these same principles, or techniques, to guide the attention of the viewer to your face in your selfies. Let’s look at one of my own selfies as an example, side-by-side with a marked-up version to show you what’s happening.