Camera Shy to Camera Confident — How to Overcome Photo Anxiety
So here’s a story for you: my mother contacted me last month and asked how she could use her LinkedIn profile to find freelance work. I took a look, and it wasn’t pretty. She had no listed experience or skills, no recommendations, and most damningly of all — no profile picture.
A profile picture is how you present yourself to the world, and as we all know, presentation can make the difference between a roaring success and quiet failure. At first glance, there’s no difference between a blank profile pic and a bot — remember twitter’s ‘egg’ problem? Having no headshot is telling employers that you don’t care about your profile, and that gives the impression that you don’t particularly care about the job, either.
I tried explaining this to my mum. She didn’t take it well.
“But do I really need a picture?” she whined, “I hate having my picture taken!”
Oh. Lightbulb moment! Suddenly I remembered that this would be a bigger obstacle than I thought. My mum doesn’t just hate having her picture taken — she’s camera shy.
Camera shyness isn’t at all uncommon, even though having your photograph taken has become a day-to-day activity. There are lots of reasons people become camera shy. Perhaps they dislike the way they look, or hate seeing a particular feature. Maybe their camera-shyness is a product of social anxiety, or a simple aversion to being the centre of attention. Like most anxiety triggers, being camera shy is fine most of the time, but crops up at the most inopportune moments. Like when you really need a headshot for your LinkedIn profile.
When I plonked my DSLR down on the dinner table during my last family visit, my mum was naturally suspicious.
“What are you doing with that?” she asked.
I told her.
“I’m writing an article about overcoming camera shyness, and I’d really like you to help.”
I gave her some time to think it over, and on the last evening of my trip, at about 9PM, I finally convinced her to take a few, very quick, headshots. With these tips, my mother overcame her camera shyness long enough to take a lovely, professional photo — and you can do the same.
Step One: Find a Friendly Photographer
In my experience, the bigger deal you make out of something the scarier it becomes. In CBT, I explore my phobias in safe, comforting environments. So it follows that to reduce the anxiety of sitting in front of a camera, you need a safe, comfortable photographer.
If you have a professional photographer friend who knows you well and is willing to walk you through the experience, great! But if you don’t, a professional studio shoot might best be avoided. The drama of getting dressed up and sitting stiffly for an hour being asked to try pose after pose is only heightened when you’re doing it all in front of a total stranger.
These days, even phone cameras can take great pictures. If you can find a friend, partner, or relative who knows the very basics, you’ll be able to produce a neat, professional looking profile picture without the hassle and stress of doing a proper shoot.
Step Two: Build Confidence
My mum hadn’t had her picture taken properly in years — so it was no wonder that she felt a little awkward on camera. The more you repeat an experience, the more predictable it becomes. When a situation becomes predictable, it becomes safe, and the anxiety surrounding it is reduced.
When I first floated this article to my Mum a month ago, I asked her to take selfies as often as she could. She didn’t. But she did take more pictures of other things, and she did familiarise herself with how cameras work and the elements of a great photo. She also spent a little longer looking in the mirror and figuring out which angles were most flattering for her.
Your practice might look different, depending on the source of your camera-shyness. If it’s a body image issue, the best thing you can do to prepare is to teach your brain to see yourself positively. Don’t focus on the negatives, not even to try and make them seem less of a problem. Instead, highlight the features you really like about yourself. If you can zero in on that one wonky tooth or the weird lump in your nose, you can make your clear skin and your cheeky smile feel just as important. When you take a selfie or look in the mirror, focus on those details, not the ones that make you feel bad about yourself.
Step Three: Get Silly
When you’re camera shy, having your picture taken can seem like a much bigger deal than it is. It’s exhausting to expose yourself to something that makes you feel anxious, and the more time you spend in front of the camera the more dour you look — and the more dour you look, the more pictures you’re going to have to take. It’s a vicious cycle. I figured that the best way to go about this shoot was to get it over with as quickly as possible, and that meant facing my mum’s anxieties head on.
It seemed like my mum’s main worry was that her picture was going to look stupid. It was as though she thought the camera would magically transform her nice smile into a goofy, gurning grin. So, logically, she tried to look as serious as possible to start with. Big mistake. My mum looked less like a hopeful freelance consultant and more like a deadly assassin who’d finally been arrested. We needed a radical shift in perspective.
“Do something silly.” I said. Mum looked at me like I’d asked her to kick a puppy.
“You know, like…” I raised my hands in the air and stuck out my tongue - “Blararargh!”
“Blararargh?”
“Yeah but, you know, sillier.”
She tried it.
“Uh… blararargh!”
I snapped a picture and showed her. That made her giggle, which made me laugh, which made her crease up entirely. Finally, I had our first genuine smile of the shoot, and it was silly. Eyes closed, emoji-grin silly. I quickly took a picture, because she looked adorable.
I showed my boyfriend.
“Aww, that’s lovely!” he said.
Instant smile.
Step Four: Act Natural
The problem with a lot of the photos I’d seen of my mum is that she was so nervous having her picture taken that she ended up with a rictus grin instead of a nice, natural smile. Now that my mum had relaxed a little, it was a lot easier to get her to smile naturally, but she was still having trouble with posing.
The thing is, when you’re asked to hold a pose you become very stiff. But when you drop out of a pose, you lose posture. So the trick is to land somewhere in between. An easy-peasy way to do this is to turn so that you’re facing a 45-degree angle, cross your legs, and stand with your weight on your back foot. If you’re not holding something, put one arm on your hip. This is a natural pose, and it’s easy to remember how to do if you’re ever caught off-guard by a photographer.
Step Five: Don’t Choose Your Own Photos
Let’s get real for a second: not every photograph from a shoot is going to be flattering, no matter how hard you try. There will be photos where you blink, where you moved just as the shutter went off, where you started talking at the wrong moment. When you’ve worked at overcoming your camera anxiety, you’ll be able to look at those photos and laugh, or at least brush them off for the unlucky incidents they are, and delete them without a second thought.
Right now, though, if you’re camera shy the last thing you need is to see photographs that seem to confirm what your anxiety was telling you all along.
A good photographer, or a good friend, will only show you the pictures where they think you look great. Maybe there’s only one or two that you can stand to look at, but trust your photographer’s instincts. Get a second opinion if you can.
It’s a sad fact that when you have body image issues, you can’t trust your gut instinct when it comes to pictures of yourself. You might think that your smile looks forced and your skin is too shiny, but your friends (and even strangers) will see a happy, friendly face.
Most importantly, remember what you’re using this profile picture for. At the end of the day, it’s just proof that you’re a human being. If a potential client sees it and thinks ‘Yep! They’re a real, professional person,’ then that photo has done its job, and you never have to take another one. Likewise, if a few months down the line you realise that you hate that photo, you can always take another one, because now it’s a familiar experience.
In the end the mini-photoshoot with my Mum took around 5 minutes from start to finish. In that time her whole attitude changed from fed-up and nervous to relaxed and cheerful.
Here’s the very first photo from the shoot, compared to the photo I chose for my mum’s profile picture. This is the difference between camera-shy and camera-confident.
With huge thanks to Michelle Seymour, for being so brave and so helpful!
