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Finally!

Operation Non-sucky Passport Photo is a success. After countless test shots and technical fiddling, I got one that will do, though the backdrop is a little dark. In the photo, I look like myself and like a human both, with a little Mona Lisa smile.

Getting a good passport photo is hard if you don't have studio equipment. You need a lot of light. A lot of white light.

My setup was a little bit ghetto. I had a white sheet on the floor to help with the bounce. I put the camera on a tripod with the lens at eye level. I had the speedlight on the camera with the light aimed at the ceiling. (If I'd had a second speedlight, I would have used it to light the backdrop and solved the problem of the dark background that way.) I stood a foot in front of the white poster board backdrop and the camera was three or four feet in front of me. I would have stood further away from the backdrop, but the room was too small. The ambient light in the room was as follows: halogen torchière in one corner behind and to the side of the camera, one window with the blind pulled all the way up (outside the sky was bright, but cloudy), and one incandescent light on the floor under the camera (aimed up at me to lighten the shadow under my chin). I tried both aperture priority and program auto modes on the camera, but this didn't make a difference, except that with a larger aperture I got a lighter image (duh). For some shots, I set the white balance to "flash" and for others I manually set the white balance against the white backdrop.

Even with all that light, the photo still came out dark. I used the "adjust color for skin tone" option in Photoshop Elements to correct for the multiple light colors. Images with the manually set white balance needed less color correction. Regardless of the white balance setting, the images were all too dark, so I lightened them and upped the contrast a bit.

(A better way to lighten the pictures would have been to use centerweighted metering so the camera would meter to my face, not my face plus the white backdrop. I should maybe try that out and see if it makes a difference. I guess this project isn't done yet.) (I just did a little test with Oz as my subject. The different metering makes a slight difference in the backdrop brightness, but is no substitute for more light.)

The State Department guidelines (pdf) say you shouldn't retouch your picture. They don't say anything about retouching yourself. When I was proofing my pictures, I noticed that, wow, my forehead was pretty shiny from the flash bouncing off the ceiling. And then I thought, hmm, maybe some lipstick? I never wear makeup, but I found an old lipstick and put on a light coating to give my mouth some definition. I also powdered my shiny spots with some translucent powder which came in the pretty, sparkly compact the Princess gave me as a bridesmaid's gift. I even remembered to brush my hair. Clearly I belong on the other side of the camera. I am not cut out to be a model.

If all this seems excessive, that's because it is. I could have shot a lousy, but perfectly acceptable passport photo in about as much time as it takes to set up the tripod.