How to choose a photo for a portrait

A portrait is drawn from a photograph, and the source matters more than most people expect. What isn't in the photo can't be invented: an artist can change a background or remove a stray reflection, but cannot see eyes that fell into shadow, or the pattern of a fabric blurred by motion.

The good news is that you don't need an expensive camera. A phone from the last few years is enough. What matters is the light you shoot in and the distance you shoot from.

Light

The best light is soft and diffused. An overcast day outdoors, a window in a room with no direct sun, the shade under an awning. That light shows the shape of a face evenly and doesn't eat the details.

What to avoid:

• Direct midday sun. It carves hard shadows under the eyes and nose and burns out the forehead and cheekbones. Those areas hold no information left to draw from.
• The built-in flash. It flattens the face and reddens the eyes.
• A single ceiling lamp. Indoors it behaves like midday sun: the eyes fall into shadow.
• Mixed light. A warm lamp on one side and a cold window on the other give the skin an unnatural colour.

A simple trick: stand facing a window, with your back to the room. The light from the window will fall evenly across the face.

Angle and distance

Shoot at eye level. A camera held low heavies the chin; held high it enlarges the forehead. Both distortions are obvious in a portrait, and "fixing" them means drawing a different person.

Don't come too close. A phone's wide lens at twenty centimetres stretches the nose and shrinks the ears. Step back a metre and a half or two, then zoom in or crop afterwards.

Leave room around the edges. A frame cut off at the top of the head limits the composition: the skull then has to be guessed at.

Sharpness and file size

Sharpness matters most in the eyes. If the eyes are blurred, the portrait loses the thing people actually recognise, and no amount of processing brings it back.

On size: more pixels is better, especially if you may later want a large print. Shoot at the highest quality your phone allows, and send the original file rather than one forwarded through a messenger. Telegram and WhatsApp compress photos several times over by default: on a screen the difference is hard to see, in print it shows immediately. In Telegram send it as "File", in WhatsApp as "Document", or simply share a cloud link.

A screenshot from social media, or a photo of a screen, won't work: the detail is already gone, and only compression artefacts remain.

Expression

A technically perfect photo with the wrong expression produces a portrait that resembles the person without being them. We recognise each other by small things: how someone holds their head, how they squint, the asymmetry of a smile.

So photos where the person is busy with something of their own tend to work better than photos of someone posing. If you're taking them yourself, talk instead of directing, and take twenty frames rather than one.

For a child's portrait this matters even more: the "photograph smile" children produce on command is almost never recognisable.

What to send

If you can't decide between photographs, send several, including the ones you like yourself. Extra shots help even when they aren't usable on their own: they show the real colour of the eyes, how the hair sits, the shape of the ears.

A short checklist:

1. Soft light, the face lit evenly.
2. Camera at eye level, a metre and a half to two metres away.
3. Eyes in focus.
4. The original file, not one forwarded through a messenger.
5. A living expression rather than a pose.

None of this is absolute: an ordinary photo from home does make a portrait. The closer the source is to this list, though, the more of you ends up in the work, and the less of it is guesswork.