Eight Awesome Selfie Ideas to Get More LIKES, Comments and Shares

Some of the most popular photos on Facebook, Instagram & Twitter these days are selfies.

Why?

Because selfies are a fun way to show people what you’re doing — and to motivate people.

They also contain something we all love to look at: human faces.

Selfies even have a Wikipedia page. Here’s what it says:

A selfie is a self-portrait photograph, typically taken with a hand-held digital camera or camera phone. Selfies are often shared on social networking services such as Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr and Twitter. They are usually flattering and made to appear casual. Most selfies are taken with a camera held at arm’s length or pointed at a mirror, rather than by using a self-timer.

Selfies have gotten super popular in the last couple years. But self-portraits were around long before the word “selfie” even existed.

Among social media pros, Joel Comm & Chris Brogan are known as 2 of the most prolific selfie lovers:

Joel (top) does it primarily to have fun & showcase his personality. Chris uses selfies to hold himself accountable for his food & exercise choices — and to motivate others.

So selfies aren’t just for teens, celebrities & the most vain among us. Many people use selfies for social media marketing.

People relate to them & love to see what others are doing.

If you’re a marketer, selfies can be your best friend when done correctly. The goal is to get engagement & not seem too salesy or narcissistic!

Check out this group selfie our CEO Josh Parkinson posted on our Facebook page:

The post got lots of engagement & helped put a face to our brand.

Is there a right way & wrong way to take a selfie? Maybe.

Luckily, I found a sweet infographic by Adorama that tries to answer this question. Here are the 8 awesome selfie ideas they recommend:

1. Put your selfie in context

try to prevent people from seeing your selfie as simply narcissistic

give them a reason to care about your photo

2. Make the selfie composition GREAT!

use an app with a “rule of thirds” grid to improve your positioning

be deliberate in how you leverage symmetry or asymmetry

crop out irrelevant or distracting elements

3. Optimize your lighting

find good ambient light to illuminate your face without exposing every detail

don’t take photos with light behind you

be careful with your phone’s “automatic white balance” setting

try ProCamera — an app that lets you optimize lighting

4. Optimize your background

avoid strange objects behind your head

avoid accidentally revealing things you don’t want shown

try using blank walls as backgrounds

take test photos to vet the background

5. Shoot from above & boost resolution

taking selfie from 10 degrees above will highlight your cheekbones, hide your double chin

use a high resolution to optimize digital enhancement.

Photography Tutorial on How to Add Light in Photoshop

Thought I would do a bit of a wedding photography tutorial on how to add light in Photoshop today, so I can take a bit of a break from wedding photography editing! The editing is the stuff wedding photographers do whilst not photographing weddings, so it's quite a big part of the job and I thought I would share this recent shot I got and go through some of the steps to get it looking how I wanted it to. It's worth noting this can be done in any room with a bit of light coming through the windows but if you have an big impressive church to capture it might have a bit more impact! When I was taking this every now and then I could see these cool shafts of light coming through the windows but it wasn't really enough to capture so I had already planned how I was going to edit this shot after the wedding (you can't stop these sorts of things and just wait for the light, it's a wedding at the end of the day). Anyway this was the end result but I will go through some of the main steps I took to get it.

This photography tutorial will be split between Lightroom (LR) for the early stages and Photoshop (PS) for the later stages. The shot was taken with a Canon 5DII with a 24-70 f/2.8L lens. Taken in manual mode at 24mm, f/2.8, 1/100 ISO3200. This is the image, unedited, straight out of the camera. One important point, generally if you shoot a lot in Av mode these types of shots tend to underexpose as the camera sees the big bright windows and thinks there is more light then there should be so it is important to either increase your exposure compensation (if in Av mode) or just go to manual and have an experiment with your settings.

Converging Verticals 

The first thing to deal with is the converging verticals which is common when photographing any architecture, basically buildings look like they are falling backwards as the vertical lines go up. This is a very quick fix in LR in the develop panel, lens correction, manual. I just move the vertical over until the walls appear parallel (in this case I used the imposing columns/arches to line up with the grid).

It is also a good idea to check the 'constrain crop' box, this way LR will crop in to remove the white sections that will appear. You will lose some of the sides on this so it is worth remembering to go a little wider when taking the photo to account for correcting the verticals later. After the verticals were corrected I just tweaked where the crop was going

Colour Temperature 

I then adjusted the temperature of the image using the white balance slider, again in the develop module. I love my images to look nice and warm so I sent this one from the cameras reasonable cool estimate of 3800K to a much more pleasing 5000K

Noise Reduction 

I then did some noise reduction in LR. The church looked nice and bright but to get this I had to go to ISO3200 which isn't ideal really so I wanted to get rid of a bit of the noise. This again is in the develop panel under 'detail' and the amounts will vary depending on what camera and ISO level you use. I have some presets set up so it's just a case of clicking on the appropriate one (there are loads of noise reduction presets for LR out there or you can go ahead and save your own. Same really for sharpening, which you can auto apply when you import your RAW files.

Photography tutorial on how to add light in Photoshop - Adjustment Brush 

The last thing I did in LR was use the adjustment brush (again in develop panel) to just bring back a bit of detail in the stained glass window. I did this by bringing down the exposure on the adjustment brush by 0.3 and reducing the highlights by 25. After that I then took the image into Photoshop for the shafts of light.

I began by using the polygonal lasso tool, on a new layer, to draw out the shaft of light from the first window, the important thing to remember is the light must spread out a little. I could use the pools of light on the floor of the church and the sides of the pews to line up the light. After this was drawn I then filled it white (ctrl + backspace)

As light isn't that sharp it must be diffused slightly. With the light shaft layer active (no selection), go to filter, blur, Gaussian blur. I went with about 25 pixels but this again is dependent on the image. This will diffuse the shaft a little. I then reduced the opacity to suit (between 20-50%) 

The next thing to do is apply a graduated layer mask to the shaft of light. This is done by adding a layer mask then selecting the graduated tool, making sure it is going from black to white and then drawing a line in the opposite direction to the light, in this case from the bottom left up to near the window. Again this may take a bit of experimentation to get right.

Expert Photographic Art Ideas You Can Use

For some people, a simple black and white image of any subject might be thought of as art, and for others, a photo made to look hyper real would be art. Art is subjective, that much is true. But whether it's in a riveting black and white style or enhanced with certain effects, the bottom line is that a great photo can be great art.

And with photographic art, you will have multiple ideas as to how you can use it. Do you have a blog? It's safe to assume that you have at least one social media page. If you're using the Web to promote your business or to present your work, images can boost your visitor traffic as well as engagement. Visually driven content is one of the key drivers to improving your position on any search engine search result page. And nothing is more captivating than artistically created photos.

If you have bare walls all around your apartment and your landlord does not allow you to paint, hanging wall art is the next best thing to enhancing your interior space. Depending on the uniqueness of the photo, your image can even become a conversation starter when you're having company over.

Scrapbooking has become so creative in the last several years. You only need to look at Pinterest and other sites that cater to the craft to realise this development. Aside from using different ribbons, letters, stickers, textured paper, and other embellishments, you can use your digitally enhanced and artistically designed photos for your scrapbook.

Some of the more well-appreciated gifts in weddings tend to be ones that have that personal touch. You can take a photo (or two) of your favourite couple and have a professional photographer work on adding effects to create a certain mood or look. You can even enlarge the photo so that the couple will have the option to hang it on their hallway or in their bedroom.

Finally, artistically enhanced photos can serve as your holiday cards. Instead of just putting on a costume to send your Christmas greetings to friends and family, you can hire a professional photographer for a studio session, and have the photos edited to look like you're in a dreamy castle made of ice.