There is a partial cure for bad pictures, it's called Photoshop.
Seriously, I'm not talking about putting your face on Cameron Diaz's body, or anything like that. The contrast, hue, and tint corrections can change a washed out pic into something vivid and exciting.
Some tips I've found helpful to progress towards good photos.
1. Do use a tripod and a remote shutter if you can. Frame the place where you're going to be sitting or standing, and make a mark for yourself, and then take the pix.
2. Be careful to not set the resolution on your photos higher than 480 x 640, which is the standard internet jpeg size. The higher the resolution, the more the minor imperfections which everyone (even Cameron Diaz) has in their complexion and body, are magnified.
3. If you don't have the time or space to set up a complementary backdrop for your pix, Photoshop lets you remove the background and replace it with azure blue, or claret, or pale gold, or whatever. Busy backgrounds in photos are always an unflattering distraction. A backdrop is better, because it soaks up light, and prevents flash bounce-back, and makes the lighting more even.
4. Use props which flatter your outfit. Obviously, you don't want to take a picture of a model-yourself wearing a leopard print jacket on a zebra stripe sofa, do you? All of us have some fashion sense about accessories and shoes, the same applies to photos.
5. The blur and smudge functions are the equivalent of an airbrush on a film image. Don't be ashamed to use them, commercial photographers aren't.
6. If you get one usable image in ten, you're doing as well as most commercial photographers. The mark of an amateur is unwillingness to take 10-15-20 more shots than you'd ever use in the end product. A lot of us, in the 40+ age bracket I would guess, tend to treat kilobytes on a flash card as if it was images on 35 mm film which cost fifty cents a pop to develop and print, and that's the wrong attitude to have.
7. Practice your poses and angles. We are all genetic men with certain proportions dialed-into our physiques by nature. Some camera angles will make us look more feminine. Low camera angles tend to emphasize long legs, and make hips look larger in proportion to shoulders than is actual. Head photos shot from above tend to obscure Adam's apples and square jaws. Certain arm angles emphasize the muscles in forearms and biceps, and those should be avoided.
8. Use your Nair, razor, and tweezers if you want to look like a woman rather than a man in a dress and lingerie. If you're into CD'ing because it's what you like, and you aren't interested in passing as a woman, that's fine, but if you want to be feminine, dark, hairy forearms and matted hair on legs underneath panty hose are not going to sell the deception, are they? Genetic women have plenty of body hair, my first wife's forearms were hairier than mine, but by modern convention they remove most of it, and . . . .
Originally Posted by gabimartini
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= Kayla Glass
