How to take your own headshot with nobody else there

Most headshot advice quietly assumes somebody else is holding the camera. If you work remotely, live alone, or simply do not want to ask a colleague to take pictures of you, that advice stops at step one.

You can do this by yourself. The result is not a compromise either, because the two things that decide whether a headshot works, light and distance, do not care who pressed the button.

Why not just take a selfie

Because of distance, and it is worth understanding rather than just being told.

At arm’s length your nose is around 35cm from the lens and your ears are around 50cm. The closer thing photographs bigger, so your nose comes out enlarged and the sides of your face fall away. From two metres, the difference between your nose and your ears is trivial in relative terms, and you come out in the proportions people see when they talk to you.

This is not vanity. Faces photographed from inside personal space are rated lower for trustworthiness and competence by people who have no idea how far away the camera was. We covered the study in why you look better in the mirror than in photos.

So the whole trick of the solo headshot is getting the camera away from you and still being able to trigger it.

The setup

Find the light first. Stand facing a window, on an overcast day or in open shade, with the window filling most of what you can see. Turn off the overhead lights so you are not mixing two colours of light. This takes longer to find than everything else combined, and it matters more.

Put something behind you. Step away from the wall. Two or three metres if the room allows. That throws the background slightly out of focus and stops light bouncing off the wall onto the back of your head.

Prop the phone at eye height. A stack of books on a chair, a shelf, an ironing board, a windowsill. Eye height specifically: below and you are shooting up your nose, above and you get the held-out-arm angle even without the arm.

Get two metres back and use the rear camera. Use the 2x or 3x lens if you have one. If not, shoot wide and crop later, which keeps the flattering proportions.

Triggering it without touching it

Four options, roughly in order of how well they work.

The self-timer, set to ten seconds rather than three. Three is enough time to press the button and not enough to settle. Ten gives you time to get back, breathe out and stop looking like someone who just pressed a button.

Burst or interval mode. Many phones can take a photo every few seconds for a minute. This is the best option if you have it, because you stop performing and start just existing in front of the camera, which is where the good frames come from.

Your watch or earbuds. If you have a smartwatch, it can usually act as a remote with a live preview, which solves framing and triggering at once. On an iPhone, the volume button on connected earbuds often works as a shutter.

Video. Record thirty seconds, then pull a still frame out of it. The quality is lower than a photo, but a frame grabbed mid-sentence looks natural in a way a posed photo rarely does. Worth it if everything else is failing.

Framing without being able to see the screen

The hardest part of shooting alone is not knowing whether you are in frame.

Put a marker where you are going to stand. A book on the floor, a bit of tape, a chair leg. Then take one test shot, look at it, adjust, and put the marker where you ended up. Now you can move away and come back to exactly the same spot all session.

Leave more room around yourself than you think you need. Cropping in afterwards is free. Discovering your head is cut off is not, and it is the one framing mistake that cannot be undone, because the missing part of your skull is not in the file.

Getting an expression on your own

This is the bit people dread, and the countdown is what makes it hard. Ten seconds of staring at a lens arranging your face is not a situation anyone looks good in.

The trick is to not hold anything. Let your face go completely slack between frames. Look away, look back at the lens, and let the timer catch you just after you re-engage. That moment is naturally alert.

If you are using interval mode, talk to yourself. Genuinely. Say what you had for breakfast. A face mid-speech is a face doing something, and every few frames will land on an expression that looks like you rather than an impression of a person being photographed.

Shoot thirty or forty frames. Professionals shoot far more than that for one usable portrait, and they have someone to talk to.

Then finish it

Once you have the frames, pick the two or three where your eyes are open, the expression looks like yours and the focus landed on your eyes. Zoom in to check the eyes specifically. A sharp photo with a slightly odd expression beats a lovely expression that is soft.

Everything else is fixable afterwards. The background does not need to be nice, the light does not need to be perfect, the crop does not need to be right. Those are adjustments to information the photo already contains.

Drop your pick in here and it will cut the room out, put you on a studio background, add a key light and a rim light, even out your skin, and crop to a proper headshot with your eyes on the conventional line. About four seconds, in your browser, and your photo is never uploaded.

Frequently asked questions

Can you take a professional headshot by yourself?

Yes. The two things that decide quality are soft light and camera distance, and neither needs a second person. A timer and something to prop the phone on covers the rest.

How far should the camera be for a self-taken headshot?

About two metres, then zoom or crop to fill the frame. The distance is what fixes the proportions; the zoom just fills the frame afterwards.

Should I use the front or rear camera?

Rear. It is the better camera on almost every phone, and using it forces you to solve the distance problem rather than shoot at arm’s length.

How do I know if I am in frame?

Take a test shot, adjust, then mark where you stood with something on the floor so you can return to the same spot. Leave extra room around yourself and crop later.

How many photos should I take?

Thirty or forty. The hit rate for a usable frame is low even for professionals, and it costs nothing.