A blog, be it personal or professional or any combination of the two, is a communication medium that benefits from transparency and honesty. One of the easiest ways to make your blog more accessible and generally a nice place to be is to add a photograph to your about page. Unfortunately, many bloggers don’t have a photograph that they are happy to use nor access to a photographer capable of creating a professional enough image. These bloggers are right to not rush into things and throw up any old snap from the family album since an amateur looking photograph, like an amateur looking design, suggests an amateur blog. And no one wants that.

Thankfully there is an easy solution to producing credible biography self portraits that are ideal for your about or biography page. Mirror shots, made popular by internet pioneer Heather Champ at The Mirror Project, are ideal because they are free to produce and have a very definite image that is perfect for a blog. All you need is a camera and a mirror.

Don’t worry, I won’t turn this into a photography post by going into camera settings and other information that you probably won’t need. The best advice for these shots is to focus on your eye and not on the camera. Also, make sure you don’t squint or close your eye which is the natural thing to do when taking a photograph using a traditional viewfinder on a digital SLR. Just look forward, focus your own vision and the camera at your reflection and press the shutter. Don’t forget to turn off the flash to prevent it bouncing back from the mirror into the camera and obliterating the shot.

If you want to get a little more technical use a shallow depth of field to throw the camera and background out of focus, leaving your face sharp.

Drop your image into photoshop, play with the levels, crop in to a point where you are happy with the look, resize to fit your blog, apply a sharpening filter to enhance the details and you are ready to upload the finished photograph and slot it into place.

The whole process can be completed in under an hour depending on how successful your shots are and how lucky you get in photoshop. The photograph above took me around 40 minutes from grabbing the camera to writing this post and adding the photo to my about page.