Do you grimace when you pull out your passport at the airport or the ID card for picking up a package?
What Makes a Great Passport or ID Card Photo?
When you apply for a passport you can upload your own digital file. Same goes for when updating your old Irish Public Services Card, which is also the same system that handles your driver licence.
The rules for the passport photo are clear and easy to follow, so many people use a phone or a tablet to capture their photo. This is perfectly fine, but if you're not happy with the result you can also use a professional. So what makes a good photo?
There are two key components for capturing a human face accurately.
1. Compression / Lens Choice
Lens choice matters with distortion. Phones tend to distort the face and make the nose appear larger and wider, as these are generally wide lenses around 24-35 mm designed to capture anything and nothing specifically.
Professionals often use focal lengths around 70-85 mm to capture a face perfectly. Some prefer it a bit wider, even at 50 mm and some like to compress even further to 100 mm or more. Depending on the person's individual features they can be either enhanced or reduced slightly with the choice of lens (focal length) that creates compression.
Above in the center, photo taken in my studio for my passport and EU ID card. On the left and right sides, photo captured on site for the Irish Public Services Card, that is also on my Driver Licence. Can you guess which one I prefer?
2. Lighting
The other and equally important factor is the light. The passport rules dictate this in a sense that harsh shadows aren't allowed. But that doesn't mean you couldn't affect the quality of light.
In studio you have a choice of a variety of light modifiers that can create any type of light from hard to soft light and everything in between. This is affected by the size and material of the modifier, and levels of diffusion. The placement of the light (height and distance) in proportion to you face also plays a huge factor in dictating how the face is sculpted in the photograph.
Headshot Studio
At my home studio in Baldoyle Dublin 13 I'm offering 30 minute professional headshot photoshoots, so it's easy to capture a passport photo during the same session.
