How to take an exam photo at home with a phone

Background

A plain white or very light wall, with you standing far enough forward that no shadow falls on it. Roughly an arm and a half of distance is enough. A white bedsheet taped flat works when no plain wall is available, but iron out the creases first — folds read as texture and can fail a white-background check.

Lighting

Daylight from a window, facing you, is the best light available and costs nothing. Stand facing the window with the camera between you and it. Avoid overhead ceiling lights on their own, which cast shadows into the eye sockets and under the nose.

Do not use the flash. On-camera flash flattens the face and throws a hard shadow onto the wall directly behind you.

Framing and camera settings

• Have someone else hold the phone. A selfie at arm's length distorts facial proportions noticeably through the wide-angle front lens.
• Use the rear camera. It is meaningfully sharper than the front one on almost every phone.
• Hold the phone at eye level, not above or below, and stand about 1.5 metres away.
• Frame loosely — head and shoulders with space around them. Cropping tightly later is easy; recovering a cut-off chin is not.
• Face the camera squarely with a neutral expression, mouth closed, both ears visible.
• Turn off any beauty or portrait mode. Background blur can be read as an altered image, and skin smoothing changes your appearance.

Then crop and resize

Once you have a good source photograph, crop it to the ratio your exam publishes and compress it into the accepted size range. Doing this in that order matters: cropping first means the compressor is working on only the pixels you actually need, so it can keep more detail at the same file size.