It is official; the selfie is here to stay! And as long as it is here, you should know how to rock an awesome one. Here are a few hacks on how to click an awesome selfie.
Know your bad angles and focus on your good ones
Everyone has a good side and a bad side, even Kim Kardashian. When you are your own photographer, you can easily de-accentuate any of your less flattering features with just a few simple tricks. Shoot your selfie from a slightly higher angle if you want to make your face look slimmer. Turn one shoulder a little bit towards the camera if you are including your torso in the shot as well. To eliminate that double chin you may have accumulated after binging on biryani, stick your neck out just a bit.
Good lighting makes all the difference
Is there anything worse than a selfie that has been taken with a camera-phone equipped with a built-in flash? Probably not. It is always better to take a selfie with natural lighting. Your selfie will have a wonderfully natural and soft look if you take it by a window around dusk. It will also make sure that none of those unflattering dark shadows are present, like the ones under your eyes, which tell the story of how you stayed up until 3 am watching Game of Thrones back to back.
Use good filters
Filters always save the day, don’t they? If you are taking your selfies with your Smartphone, chances are that you already have a couple of pretty awesome filters that you can use on them to make them look even better. You can check out apps like everyone’s favorite Instagram, or other photo-editing tools like Photo Grid, Snapseed, Lo-Mob or Photo FX. Artistic filters can help to soften features that are too prominent and make less-than-perfect complexions look more appealing. They can definitely make your selfie look much better than the original.
Try and loosen up a bit
Life shouldn’t be taken too seriously and neither should your selfie. Your selfie should come across like you are trying too hard to be cool. Too much pouting, too many doe-eyes, too much sexiness, this might actually work against you rather than in your favor. Ideally, your selfie needs to look effortless and casual. It should seem like you were just walking down the street, minding your own business, and you just happened to click a photograph of yourself, and it just happened to turned out to be awesome.
Set the stage for your selfie
Remember, every single location on the face of the planet does not qualify as a stage for your selfie. Take your kitchen for instance; would you like to be posing in front of a huge pile of unwashed dishes? Probably not. Your bathroom? Well, this is a gray area. Some bathrooms, which are pretty and have been done up well, make a good setting for your selfie. Your selfie should be taken with the same sensibilities that you would use when you take other photographs. Always keep backgrounds in mind when choosing a setting. The next time you come across a beautiful field, a beach at sunset, a valley of flowers, a waterfall or any other scenic setting, snap away.
Turn inaction into action
Selfies today just feature people posing. Either they have duck-face, sparrow-face, or frog-face going on. And in all of these selfies, the person is just standing around, doing nothing. Think about it. Have you seen an interesting selfie since of late? They all look the same, a close-up headshot of people pouting. Not so interesting. Why don’t you make a conscious decision that henceforth, none of your selfies are going to look like that. Instead, choose to take a selfie that is both postable and interesting by doing something different. Maybe include your pet in the picture, or take a selfie while jumping. The need of the hour is to do something that will make your selfies stand out from the zillions of other selfies floating around.
Try not to go overboard with the entire thing
To take the perfect selfie that you are 100% satisfied with, you are probably going to have to take quite a few trial and error shots. But that doesn’t mean that all those trial and error shots should be posted online. Can you imagine if your friends log onto Facebook or Instagram, and they see 21 photo updates of you all posted within the last half an hour? That would make you come across as a sociopath and more importantly, as totally lame! That is why you should only post just a small percentage of all the selfies that you take.
So there you have it. All the tips and tricks for you to take that perfect selfie. Remember, selfies can be a fun way of expressing yourself and there is no reason that you shouldn’t have a little bit of fun. But the golden rule of sticking to moderation really applies here. Don’t go overboard with your selfies otherwise you might turn into a selfie addict, and there is no going back from there. Just ask Kim Kardashian!
