Taking a photo of your own face is a deeply strange thing to do. You stand in front of a wall, you try to look like a person, and every expression you make feels enormous and fake.
That feeling is normal and it does not show up in the photo. What does show up is where the camera was standing. Get that one thing right and a phone photo can be genuinely good — good enough for a school show, a community theater audition, a program bio, a first casting profile. Here's how to do it, whether someone's helping you or you're DIYing in your bedroom with a stack of books.
What's in here
- The one mistake that ruins most phone headshots
- Which camera on your phone to use, and which to avoid
- Where to stand, and where the light goes
- How to do it alone, with no tripod
- What to do with your face when you feel ridiculous
What makes a phone headshot look wrong?
Distance. When a camera is close to your face, the parts closest to the lens look bigger than they are. Your nose is closest, so your nose grows. Your ears are furthest, so they shrink or vanish. Nothing about your face is wrong. The camera is just standing too close.
Researchers at Rutgers and Stanford built a model of the average face and ran it at different camera distances. At about twelve inches — roughly where a phone sits when your arm is bent — the face seems larger than it really is. At five feet, the difference basically disappears.
So every selfie you've ever taken has been lying to you a little. That's oddly nice to know.
How far back does the camera need to be?
Five feet back. Everything else is detail.
Five feet is about three big steps, or two arm-spans, or the long side of a bathmat. You don't need a tape measure. You need to be far enough that holding the phone yourself is impossible — which is the whole point, and which is why this post has two halves.
Being further back means your face is smaller in the frame. That's fine. You'll crop in afterward. It is always better to stand back and crop than to stand closer.
Which camera should you use?
The one on the back of your phone, at 2x. Not the selfie camera. The front camera on your phone is wider and shorter than the rear one, which makes the distance problem worse — it's the weakest camera on the phone for this exact job.
| Setting | Use it? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Rear camera, 2x | Yes — this one | On most current phones this is close to a classic portrait lens |
| Rear camera, 1x | Fine if you have no 2x | Works. Just stand back and crop |
| Front (selfie) camera | Avoid | Wider lens, worse distortion |
| 0.5x ultra-wide | Never | Bends faces, especially near the edges |
| Portrait mode | Only if you must | The fake blur leaves halos around flyaway hair. A plain wall beats it |
Resolution is not something you need to worry about. Any phone made in the last several years produces a file far larger than anything you'll be asked to upload. Phone headshots fail on distance, light, and background — never on megapixels.
Where should you stand?
Facing a window, on an overcast day, with a plain wall behind you. That's the entire lighting setup. Overcast light is soft and even, which is flattering and forgiving. Direct sun is the enemy — it makes hard shadows and makes you squint.
- Face the window. The light should be in front of you, not behind. A window behind can turn you into a silhouette.
- Stand a couple of feet off the wall. Pressed against it, you get a hard shadow outlining your head.
- Pick a boring background. A painted wall, a garage door, a fence, a shaded brick wall. Nothing with a doorframe or a poster growing out of your head.
- Turn off the overhead lights. Mixing window light and ceiling light makes weird colors.
- Outside works too. Open shade — the shady side of a building — is the best free light there is.
How do you do it with a friend — or by yourself?
Both work. They're just different problems.
If someone's helping: hand them the phone, tell them five feet and 2x, and ask them to take way more photos than feels reasonable. Thirty is not too many. Ask them to hold the phone at the height of your eyes — if they're much taller or shorter than you, they'll need to bend or stand on something. A camera shooting up your nose is its own kind of unflattering.
If you're doing it yourself: you need the phone to stand up five feet away. A stack of books on a chair or dresser works. So does propping it in a mug, or leaning it against a plant, or wedging it between two books on a shelf. Then use the self-timer — set it to ten seconds so you have time to walk back and settle — or, if your phone allows it, a smartwatch or headphone button as a remote shutter. Burst mode is your friend here; it fires many frames from one press, and one of them will catch you between faces.
Put something where you'll be standing before you walk back — a piece of tape on the floor, a shoe, a book. Otherwise you'll drift, and half your photos will be out of focus or off-center.
What do you do with your face?
This is the part everyone dreads, and it's worth saying plainly: it feels ridiculous. You're going to stand alone in a room making faces at a phone balanced on some books. There is no version of this that feels cool. Everyone who has ever done it felt exactly the same way, including people who do it for a living.
The trick is that you're not trying to pose. You're trying to have a thought. A face with a thought behind it looks like a person; a face holding still looks like a passport photo. So:
- Look at something specific. Not the lens generally — a particular spot on the lens.
- Think of an actual thing. A joke someone told you. A person you like. It shows up in the eyes and you cannot fake it.
- Take three kinds: warm, calm and serious, and the face you make when you're really listening to someone.
- Shake it out between rounds. Literally. Roll your shoulders, make a stupid face on purpose, then go again.
The good photo almost always comes after the first twenty. Your face relaxes once it gets bored of being photographed. So take more than you think you need, and don't judge any of them until you're done.
What doesn't work?
Some of these are obvious and all of them turn up constantly:
- A photo in a car. The light is strange, the headrest is behind you, and everyone can tell.
- A cropped group photo. Somebody's shoulder is always still in it, and the resolution falls apart when you zoom in.
- Anything blurry. If you can't see the eyes clearly at full size, it's not usable. No exceptions.
- Sunglasses, hats, or heavy filters. The photo exists so someone can recognize you later.
- A photo from five years ago. If you don't look like it now, it's not doing its job.
- Straight-up-the-nose angles. Camera at eye height. Always.
Common questions
When it is worth paying for
A session with a photographer is a different set of decisions — how to prepare for acting headshots covers what to pack, what to practice, and how many images to order.
One more thing. The first time you do this, you will delete almost everything and feel like it went badly. Then you'll look again the next morning and find two you actually like. That's not you being bad at it. That's just how it goes, for everyone, every time.
Do this now: find your spot before you find your outfit. Walk around your house and look for a plain wall with a window facing it. That's the whole shoot, and it takes four minutes to find.
Then measure five feet from that wall and put something on the floor to mark it.
More tools for putting a show together live in the theatre production templates library.
The Acting Resume Template
A Google Doc in the format casting expects, with the margins set for the 8 × 10 trim and the four credit columns already built. Comes blank and filled in, non-union, union, and student.
- 5 files
- Google Docs
- Trims to 8 × 10
- Adult & youth versions
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