How to Take the Best Profile Picture
Put your best self forward.
Here at OkCupid we’re all about substance over selfie. But that doesn’t mean your selfie can’t have substance. We want to help you make your profile picture as interesting and engaging as the rest of your profile. In this article we’ll aggregate 11.4 million opinions on what makes a great photo.
To find out what makes a good profile picture on OkCupid we collected 552,000 example user pictures, paired them up and asked people to make snap judgments, like so:
We collated these millions of judgments with the time of day each picture was taken, what the shutter speed was, and so on. Almost all modern cameras embed this stuff in a special header, called EXIF data.
We also made graphs (you’re welcome).
Here are our findings:
1. Panasonic > Canon > Nikon.
Prefer a professional camera over your phone? Well, the type and brand of camera you use has a huge effect on how good you look in your pictures. This is a plot of the most popular makes:
As you can see, the general pattern is that more complex cameras take better pictures. Not sure what’s going on with Kodak all the way to the right there. They might want to consider making sharing more difficult.
Beyond the advantages or shortcomings of any specific brand, the more-complex-is-better trend bears out at all ages:
And we also found similar numbers looking only at people who uploaded all three types of photos. Putting such a triplet together dramatically illustrates the difference in quality:
Just so you know, the names and the actual photos are removed when we do this kind of research; we just see the stats in aggregate. Everything is anonymized. Now let’s leave brands and gadgets aside and look at how purely photographic phenomena can affect your photos.
2. Flash is not your friend.
This is another simple finding that needs little explanation.
The hard light of a flash often ages the appearance of its subject by accentuating wrinkles and blemishes. As I illustrate with the dotted lines below, you can calculate the equivalent “aging” effects of a flash by counting years horizontally between the ‘flash’ and ‘no flash’ lines. For example, a 28 year-old who used a flash looks similar to a 35 year-old who didn’t.
One thing we observed is that most flash exposures — even from SLR’s — appeared to be direct flash. That’s where the flash was fired directly at the subject, producing harsh shadows. If you have access to a flash that can bounce off the ceiling or walls, that could work much better. That’s what the professionals do!
3. Blot out all other reality.
We found that the best pictures have a very shallow depth of field, meaning that the subject is in crisp focus while the rest of the picture is blurry, like this:
I’ll spare you my explanation of the optics behind this and instead let a graphic from the 10,000 word wikipedia page fill you in:
Thanks, hivemind, you genius! Basically, you get this sharp/blurry effect from having a wide-open aperture: low f numbers on your camera, like f/1.8, f/2.2, etc. For two pictures taken at the same distance, the lower f number will give you a shallower depth of field.
The widget below plots the aggregate quality, by f number, of our user photos in a little color-coded array, alongside examples of each type of photo, so you can easily see how the depth of field affects things. For obvious reasons, we restricted this analysis to photos by cameras capable of a wide range of apertures.
This might because the photos with the low f numbers feel more intimate and personal, they get a better viewer response. So get intimate and personal and play with depth of field.
4. There are peak times of the day to take a good picture.
Below is a minute-by-minute distribution of when people are taking their pictures. This plot also does a good job of showing off the sheer number of photos we analyzed for this piece:
Of course, the most interesting thing isn’t when people are taking their photos, but when they are taking their best photos:
It seems that, broadly speaking, late night and late afternoon are optimal. I can’t really say why that is, but I can irresponsibly theorize that photos taken in the former bracket tend to be more provocative, those taken in the latter tend to be pleasantly lit.
As noted, the plotted timestamps are adjusted by time zone and for daylight savings, and when you overlay the path of the sun through the sky during our theoretical “day”, you see peaks just after sunrise and just before sunset: evidence of the golden hour.
In conclusion, the data strongly suggest that if you’re looking to take the best profile picture, you (or someone you know) should learn a little bit about photography. Technique can make or break your photograph, and the right decisions can get you more dates.
So get out there. Use a decent camera. Go easy on the flash. Own the foreground. Take your picture in the afternoon. Done.
This post has was originally published in 2010 and has since been updated to reflect OkCupid’s current values.
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