You do not need a studio. You need a plain wall, daylight, and someone to hold the phone. The parts people get wrong are almost always lighting and distance, not the camera.
What you need
- A phone with a rear camera
- A plain, light-coloured wall
- A window with daylight, ideally indirect
- Another person, or a tripod and a timer
The method
1. Stand about a metre from the wall.
This is the step people skip, and it matters most. If you stand against the wall, your shadow falls directly onto it and appears in the photo behind your head. A metre of separation puts the shadow on the floor, out of frame.
2. Face the light.
Stand facing a window, with the light on your face, not behind you. Backlighting turns you into a silhouette and no amount of brightness adjustment recovers it. Avoid direct midday sun, which casts harsh shadows under the eyes and nose — overcast daylight is close to ideal.
3. Use the rear camera.
Front-facing cameras use wide lenses that distort features at close range, which is why selfies look subtly wrong. The rear camera is the better lens. Turn off any beauty filter, portrait mode or background blur — these are grounds for rejection.
4. Get the distance right.
The photographer should stand far enough back that you are visible from roughly mid-chest up, then zoom with their feet, not the lens where possible. Too close and the lens distorts your nose; too far and there is not enough resolution in your face.
5. Look straight at the lens.
Head straight, shoulders square, eyes open and looking at the camera. Neutral expression — a slight closed-mouth smile is fine for most boards, a broad grin is not. The camera should be at your eye level, not above or below, which means the photographer may need to crouch or stand on something.
6. Take a dozen.
Blinks, slight head turns and micro-expressions are invisible in the moment and obvious later. Take many and pick.
What to wear
- Ordinary clothes in a colour that contrasts with the wall. A white shirt against a white wall leaves you looking disembodied.
- No cap or headgear, unless worn for religious reasons — and then the full face must still be visible.
- No dark glasses. Clear spectacles are usually fine if there is no glare; if the lenses catch the light, take them off.
- Some notifications prohibit uniforms.
Cropping it
Once you have a good frame, the crop is the easy part:
- Face from the top of the head to the chin should fill about 70 to 80 per cent of the frame height
- Head centred left to right
- A little space above the head, not a tight cut
- Shoulders visible at the bottom
Open the photo in our passport photo resizer or your exam's own page, drag to position and pinch to zoom. The output is the exact pixel size and file size your board requires.
Check before you upload
Our pre-flight check flags a blurred photo, a background that is busy or dark, a black-and-white image, and a face that is too small or too large in the frame. It runs automatically when you create the file.
It cannot tell you whether the photo looks like you, whether you are wearing a cap, or whether it was taken recently enough. Look at the result at full size before uploading, and see why exam photos get rejected for the full list.