Taking your own passport photo

[Lois]

I'm in need of quite a few passport photos for various things. I am not impressed at having to pay £10 in a photo booth (which I've already done once but came out too dark and had white lines on my face!) or I can take the photo myself and print it online for £1.99.

My problem is I can't get rid of shadows. I've tried standing at different distances from the wall but I have to have the flash on to get the quality required.
Is it actually possible with my 450D and no special photography equipment.

[otherman]

Its the direct flash that's doing it. You either need a camera with a flash that can bounce off something and not directly at the subject, or find a room with good natural light and take it in the daytime.

[tim-b]

try holding/taping a sheet of white A4 paper infront of the flash, this will diffuse the light so it looks more natural. Holding it some distance away (infront) from the flash will work better, obviously without getting it in shot

[LongQ]

Forget the flash, take it with house lights (tungsten?) and set the appropriate White Balance OR shoot RAW and correct the colour balance in Post Processing.

That said some organisations have very specific requirements for 'passport' shots so you may need to make sure you cover those.

Using 'head on' lighting only, from almost whatever source, will not produce a great result even for a passport snap.

[Lois]

I shall try the paper trick tomorrow if I'm home before sundown!

[XG332]

At Jessops we use a simple fuji bridge camera pre set up for it.
Settings
High iso
No flash
Reasonable aperture

Then into an Id printer and moving the picture to meet guidelines for face size and placement.
Cut out with a press cutter
Done
£7 please

[HereBeMonsters]

Put some paper over a window to diffuse sunlight.

[crmcatee]

And don't forget if you apply for a lot of visas for traveling (like I do) or need pictures for ID's etc.

Take your image into Photoshop and make it the passport size, make a new page (A4 size), take your original image and put multiple copies of onto the A4 sheet. You'll get 25 on there aligned nicely and a couple tagged on at the end in landscape mode.

Save the image as a JPG and send it up to Photobox and get them to print it on A4.

Grand total £2.60 inc postage.

Job done.

[Ben Hughes]

I did my own one for my driving license and passport too.

AV Mode, F/8, ISO 100, bounced my flash off the ceiling - set off with a cable release held out of shot.

A basic edit in PS, load up an A4 document, paste the finished shot in a few times, print on good quality photo paper and cut out with a scalpel and steel rule.

Job jobbed, 30 mins and negligible cost.

[sjg]

White wall (but stand away from it), ideally in a room that gets good daylight. If not, then whatever other lights (desk lamps, table lamps, uplighters) you can get your hands on and move them around till you get a good shot without shadows.

You can faff about with photoshop yourself, or my last batch I did via http://www.epassportphoto.com/ who let you upload a pic, have a neat process for cropping it to the right dimensions then generate a JPG for 6x4 with seven photos on it. Drop it on a USB stick and the local Boots charges 34p each for instant 6x4, bit less if you can wait an hour - or use one of the online services instead.

[Kwacker]

I did it once.

It ended in a 400 round trip to get ones that the passport office would accept. Oh and then they needed to be signed/verified by someone in public office like a teacher, solicitor, priest.

Make sure you know the rules to save yourself the same hassle I had.

Kwacker

[jimmy156]

I must take in the region of 100+ passport photo's a week with my job, i also see plenty of people who bring in ones they have taken themselves and they have never , not once, been good enough for a passport in over a year that i've been working there.

The easiest things to do will be to go to somewhere like Snappysnaps or jessops and get someone to take the photo to passport spec, this way you'll have a human doing it not a machine, and most places (i know we do!) will do it again (and again and again if necessary) if it doesent get accepeted.

If you want to do it yourself you will need to have a basic photo editing skills, and a white wall. As others have suggested bounce/off camera flash is the best way to do it but if you only have on camera flash i advise the following:

1: Take the shot with flash with your back up against a white wall. You may need to set your camera to under expose by half a stop or so, to allow the background to be grey and not white

2: open the photo in photoshop or similar and crop to head and shoulders tp 35mm wide and 45mm tall at 300dpi.

3: Using the ruler in photoshop, insure that your head is between 29mm and 36mm (i think!) tall.

4: create new blank file at a size you can print i.e A4 or 6x4, also at 300dpi.

5: drag the photo of you across into the new blank file.

6: select the layer that is your image and copy it (CTRL-J) as many times as you can fit it on the page and print on good quality paper.

thats for a British passport, its different for other countries but the principles are the same. Its worth checking your photo against the passport specification as there are loads of little things you have to make sure are right (no smiling, mouth closed, no reflections in glasses, nothing in your hair etc etc etc. )

Edited by jimmy156 on Wednesday 10th November 19:37

[Simpo Two]

jimmy156 said:

3: create new blank file at a size you cant print

Eventually I found the flaw in that

I took my own photo for a driving licence and it was accepted without problems, but maybe passports are more demanding?

[jimmy156]

Simpo Two said:

jimmy156 said:

3: create new blank file at a size you cant print

Eventually I found the flaw in that

I took my own photo for a driving licence and it was accepted without problems, but maybe passports are more demanding?

oops! thats an honest typo, and now you've quoted me i cant quietly correct it. From my experience driving liscenses whilst having the same specifications, are far less likely to be rejected. I keep having ladies passport photo's rejected becauese there foreheads are too shiney!

[LongQ]

jimmy156 said:

Its worth checking your photo against the passport specification as there are loads of little things you have to make sure are right (no smiling, mouth closed, no reflections in glasses, nothing in your hair etc etc etc. )

No mention of rucksacks then?

[Lois]

arghhhhhhhhhhh
I have tried yet another photo booth today and had to get yet another refund, this time it had a big splodge of dust or something on the lens which printed out like I had grey roots on each photo!! Not impressed!

We tried again to take our own and with a make shift light diffuser managed to pretty much eliminate shadows.

2 problems now...

1) How strict are they on background colour? Our white wall has come out almost peachy!

2) I have looked at ePassportPhoto and PhotoBox and they both seem to have different dimensions when I do a preview so don't know who to go with, and as such I cant get sjg's suggestion to work.

p.s. I don't have good enough photoshop skills, in fact I have no idea where my copy of it actually went!!

[jimmy156]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Pretty strict, needs to be grey/off white. If its peachy or blue it will probably be rejected.

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Photo needs to be 35mm width x 45mm height for a british passport.
Your head, from crown to chin, will need to be 29-36mm.

anonymous said:

[redacted]

This may be your main problem, as without being able to set up a template to print it at the right size you wont get anywhere at all!

ETA: LongQ, i'm not sure i get your rucksack reference

I would just go to a jessops/snappysnaps or similar and get it done with!

Edited by jimmy156 on Sunday 14th November 18:45

[LongQ]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Your peach coloured background is likely a white balance problem - but you would need a reasonable editor application to sort it out if it is only in one part of the image. It sound like that might be a non-option.

My Canon printer came with an application that allows the configuration of photo printing and seems to include functionality for multiple 'passport' style thumbnail prints on a sheet of A4.

Of course this is no help to you at all unless your printer software offers the same feature.

I would be inclined to go with the suggestion of going somewhere that offers a full service. If you need pics for several different things it should be possible to have extras printed I would have thought - for just the price of the printing. This of course assumes that all your needs are satisfied by a passport sized picture and rules. These days it would not surprise me if all possible requirements from different requirers have their own standards, if you see what I mean.

[Lois]

2 passport
2 driving licence
2+ for various job interviews

If I can find somewhere to take my pic I'll give in!

[LongQ]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Last time I needed a passport snap some years ago I used one of the High Street photo processing places though many have disappeared since then.

Snappysnaps seem to be around still.

http://www.snappysnaps.co.uk/passport-photos/

The larger postoffices have machines but you may already have tried them.

Boots?

Jessops/Jacobs perhaps? Maybe not.

I think many people try to do their own these days.

Won't be long before all out mug shots are on a global 'secure' database accessible to any 'authority' via any form of mobile communicating device. In fact if you travel to the states they can probably ID you from the biometric data they have previously captured.