How to Look Great in Your Vacation Photos

Everyone wants to look their best in photographs. This is especially true when you are on vacation. This article lists seven easy tips that anyone can follow to look great in their vacation photos.

Photographs are an excellent way to share and preserve the memories of a wonderful vacation. Whether you plan to post your photos to social media or paste them in a photo album, the goal is the same: to capture a happy moment in time. So of course you want to make sure you look your best!

Follow these tips whenever you are snapping photos—or yourself or of the friends and family with whom you are vacationing—and you can be sure everyone will look as wonderful as they really are.

1. Minimize a wrinkly or shiny face

Airplane trips can be very dehydrating, so use extra moisturizer to keep skin looking radiant, since the camera can make sallowness and wrinkles appear more pronounced. Of course you don’t want a shiny face either—so use foundation and translucent powder when necessary. And be sure to extend foundation to the neck and décolletage since differences in skin tone will be more pronounced on camera.

Maximize available light

Set up your shot to get as much light on the face as possible. Indoors, pose your subject close to the window or other light source (remembering that natural light is always the most flattering). And indoors and out, always use the flash—the light will illuminate the skin and conceal imperfections. The exception is for photos taken on a white sand beach or out in the snow—the reflective qualities of the scenery itself will help light up your subject’s face.

To keep your subjects from looking too posed and rigid, keep up a natural conversation as you set up the shot, have them sit on or lean against something, and have them hold onto something—even just their sunglasses or hat—to ensure that their hands aren’t straight down by their sides. Feel like the photo looks staged? Ask your subjects to jump up and down for a moment to help them loosen up.

Banish double chins

Avoid the dreaded double chin by ensuring that the camera is at or slightly above the subject’s eye level. Shorter photographers can achieve this by having their subjects sit down and look up toward the camera, or by having their subjects bend their knees slightly. (And now you know why fashion photographers so often use step ladders!)

Don’t blink

Closed eyes can be a problem for everyone (we all have to blink from time to time), but it seems to be most pronounced in group photos when just one person with eyes closed requires another shot. So tell everyone to shut their eyes and count to three. On the count of three, say something funny or unexpected so that everyone will open their eyes and laugh, and you’ll snap the perfect picture.

Turn, turn, turn.

By directing your subject to turn his or her head slightly and look over your shoulder rather than directly into the camera lens, you’ll avoid both the “deer-in-the-headlights” look and help your subject look slimmer, since in the resulting photo, the viewer’s eye will be drawn up and down rather than from side to side (if it is a full-body shot, encourage the subject to turn his or her whole body for the same reason).

Get rid of red-eye

No one likes the appearance of being possessed. Since red-eye occurs when the pupils have opened up in response to dim light (which allows the flash to light up all the eyes’ red blood vessels), you can avoid it by having your subjects look at a bright light just before the photo is taken. Note that this is essentially what the anti-red-eye feature on some cameras does.

These tricks may sound simple—and they are—but they work. By ensuring that you and anyone else you may be photographing looks their best, you can capture vacation memories that you’ll happily share for years to come.

Published on Tuesday, September 28, 2021