In the United States, England, and across western Europe, getting a passport photo taken and printed will run you around $10 (7.4 euros) for basically a low quality head shot with a white background. There are two simple ways to get passports at a fraction of the cost and at home.
Do It Yourself
A passport photo (in the US) needs to be 2 inches by 2 inches on a white background, with your head taking about 1 inch from the chin to top of the hair. Any camera over 1 megapixel (essentially all of them now) will meet the US and most European requirements.
For the white background all you need is a white wall or clean sheet (showing no shadows) and your picture will be accepted. So many people worry about their passport photos being rejected and pay a ridiculous markup for poor quality wallet sized pictures just because they are called ‘passport photos’.
- It’s important to know the requirements for your country (here are some for the United States, Brazil, and Germany for example). The ePassport Photo Blog has a full list (on the right column under ‘Tags’).
Print the pictures on your photo printer or take them to a photo shop with a laser printer. I’d hesitate printing the pictures on an ink jet however. If you don’t have access to a color laser printer, head by the photo store, just don’t mention you’re printing “passport” photos since they may charge you extra, as James warns.
ePassport Photo
The service ePassport Photo lets you upload a photo, crop it to the appropriate portions and download the file for printing at your local store or on your home printer. ePassport Photo aides the do-it-yourself process above by giving you guidelines and a handy tool to make sure the pictures are cropped with the proper dimensions.
- ePassport Photo also has the option of shipping your passport pictures internationally and having them verified by their staff before they are sent. The cost varies, but is around $7 in the US.
There are plenty of other services like ePassport Photo as well as tutorials on taking passport photos at home properly. For example, Minezine links to a detailed guide on making your passport photos using Photoshop.
It’s Not That Hard!
Travelers often spend the money on store bought passport photos thinking that there is some magic requirement met by having someone else take the picture and charge you $4 per square inch of it. Most countries have very simple passport requirements that any amateur photographer (like yourself) can take at home against a white wall. Keep in mind if you wait until the last minute you might save on the cost of passport photos but pay extra for speeding up your passport application.
Have you ever taken your own passport photo or do you still pay someone else to do it? I’m curious to find out, let me know in the comments.
[photo by: privatenobby]
Ah, Anil, I’ve done both! Doing it at home is good because the studio guys are idiots (lol), they never get a good picture of me and they are always hesitant to take more pics, as if their digital camera is going to die or something. Plus somehow I don’t like pics in artificial lighting with fake neutral expressions on face and other annoying things they ask you to do. So I always took pics at home and printed them at my office printer, lol!
@ Final:
In most cases I’ve been to the store, the people taking the pictures hardly knew the requirements! The quality is always poor and the background looks piss yellow. Plus I’d always end up looking very sketchy in those pictures. For a while I fell under the ‘magic requirements’ belief, but I won’t pay for passport photos again.
I’ll definitely be using ePassport Photo’s help in the next year or so. When I did the Walgreens photo back in 2001 they simply pulled down a dirty screen in front of the ice cream freezer and I waited for 45 minutes – for the same thing I could have done myself on the machine. (printing out a photo)
With excellent and inexpensive photo editing software, plus more people obtaining passports for Canada/Mexico travel many have realized they don’t need the, – ahem – “professionals” at Walgreens to take a photo of them for $8.
cheers…
In Bangkok we were despirately looking for a photo studio as passport photos needed for Myanmar Embassy. I don’t know if they can be found in embassy area, but as we were passing the embassy already, decided to ask. It was a door for burmese but we were invited inside and the friendly lady asked to stand at the wall and took a passphoto with a simple small soap box camera and then printed them. The new photo for Indian visa must be a quadraat size, in Yangoon now there is an office near Indian embassy who fill in the forms and tear your 3×4 photo somewhat wider by the computer so that you are really surprised to see yourself on the photo. But it’s ok for embassy. 7 or 8 € in the Indian embassy in Brussels for a pale low quality photo.
@ james:
Exactly…”professionals”…