Photoshoot ideas at home that need nothing you do not already own

Seven setups that use only a window

• The 45 degree window portrait. Stand about a metre from a window that the sun is not shining directly through, turn your face roughly 45 degrees toward the glass, and have the camera at 2x from two metres. You get a soft shadow down one side of the nose and a catchlight in both eyes. This is the base setup and most of the others are variations on it.
• Curtain diffusion. If the sun is hitting the window, pull a white net curtain across it or tape baking paper to the glass. A hard beam becomes a soft source the size of the window, which is the closest thing to studio light a flat contains.
• Printer paper fill. Hold a sheet of A4 or a white pillowcase at chest height on the dark side of your face, half a metre away and just out of frame. The shadow lifts visibly as you tilt it.
• Door frame lean. Stand in a doorway with the lit room behind the camera and the darker room behind you. The frame gives straight verticals to line up with, and the dark room separates you from the background with no blur at all.
• Hallway compression. Shoot down the longest corridor at 2x or 3x from four to five metres. The long lens compresses the walls, the background softens at that distance, and a corridor is usually the emptiest space in a home.
• Blind stripes. Mid-morning or mid-afternoon with sun on a venetian blind, close the slats to about 30 degrees. Bars of light fall across the wall and the face, and moving 20 centimetres slides them where you want.
• Bedsheet backdrop. Tape a plain sheet to the wall the night before so the creases drop out, then stand a metre in front. The gap matters: against the sheet you get texture and your own shadow, a metre off it goes soft and even.

Seven for after dark

• Lamp at a metre. One warm lamp, shade off, a metre away and slightly above eye level, with every other light off. One light rather than four is the point: four ceiling spots is why indoor photos look flat.
• Screen light. At night, fill a laptop or television screen with a plain white or coloured image and sit 50 to 70 centimetres in front. It is soft and cool, and it leaves a rectangular catchlight in the eyes.
• Fairy light bokeh. Hang string lights two to three metres behind you and shoot at 2x from 1.5 metres. The blur that turns them into circles comes from that distance, not from an app.
• Bathroom mirror, lights off. Ceiling light off, door open, hallway light coming in from the side. Overhead bathroom lighting is the most unflattering light in any home, and this removes it.
• Kitchen counter still life. Morning or evening light raking across a counter, shot from counter height rather than above: a cup, a hand, crumbs. The low angle is what makes it look photographed rather than documented.
• Torch through a glass of water. A phone torch behind a half-full glass, 30 centimetres from a plain wall, throws a rippled pattern to stand in front of or to shoot on its own.
• Steam and glass. Run a hot shower until the glass fogs, then shoot through it from 40 centimetres, wiping one patch clear for a sharp window in a soft frame.

Every setup, what you need, best light

Where to put the phone when nobody is holding it

Height decides more than anything else in a self-shot photo. For a full-length frame the lens wants to be at roughly hip height, about a metre off the ground. A phone on a table at 75 centimetres tilted up lengthens your legs and shrinks your head; on a shelf at 1.5 metres tilted down it does the reverse.

Keep the phone vertical and level rather than tilted, and shim the base with a book if you need to change the angle, because tilting the phone bends every vertical line in the room. Stand three to four metres back at 1x for a full body, and never use 0.5x on a person indoors, where the edge correction lands on furniture and makes the room look like a fairground.

Focus is the part people forget. With nobody in frame the camera focuses on the far wall, then hunts when you walk in. Put a bag on your mark, tap and hold on it until AE/AF LOCK appears, then take the bag away. For triggers that avoid the ten-second run-back, see apps to take photos hands free.

Making a flat stop looking like a flat

Home photos read as home photos because of what is behind the subject. Three fixes, in order of effect.

Clear one wall, not the room. You only need the area the lens actually sees, which at 2x from two metres is roughly a metre and a half wide. Pick the emptiest wall in the flat and clear a metre either side of where you will stand.

Put distance behind you. Two metres between you and the wall does more for separation than any portrait mode, because depth of field softens whatever is far away and the wall stops competing with the face. The physics is in how to blur the background.

Kill the ceiling lights. Overhead lighting mixed with daylight gives you one warm cheek and one cool one, and no white balance setting corrects a frame lit by two colours at once. One source, whichever source, always beats four.

One of ours, and not out yet: ShutterAI's Light Finder tells you when the good light is due where you are, which at home mostly means knowing when the sun leaves the window. It comes to iPhone this fall, free to start, and there is a waitlist.

What goes wrong indoors, and the quick fix

• Everything looks orange. Warm bulbs, and the phone overcorrecting. Turn them off and use one source, or correct Warmth and Tint afterwards using the whites of the eyes as the reference.
• The photo is grainy and slightly smeared. Not enough light, so the phone dropped the shutter speed. Move closer to the window, or brace against the door frame and stay still through the exposure.
• The face is dark against a bright window. The meter exposed for the window. Tap and hold on the face, then drag up by roughly a stop, and accept that the window will go white.
• Shadows under the eyes. Overhead light. Move so the main light is at eye level and to one side, which is what a window gives you.