1. Control the light. This one seems obvious, but a lot of people seem to think the camera knows best. It doesn't. If your background is exceptionally dark, the camera may attempt to overexpose the entire shot to compensate for that darkness. This can result in the subject being way too bright. By the same token, a bright background (snow or a beach) can force the opposite effect and your subject might be way too dark. Most cameras have a way to override the automatic settings, so try that a few times to get the hang of it. PRO TIP: Avoid the on-camera flash. Shadows are the only way to show depth and texture in a 2-dimensional photo and having the light source millimeters from the lens axis removes any trace of a shadow, resulting in a flat, boring photo. If you can have someone else hold a lamp or other light source off to the side, do that, or use whatever available lighting exists in your location. Google examples of "chiaroscuro."

2. Clean up the clutter. No one wants to see your laundry or dirty dishes. A few seconds spent cleaning up your room can make all the difference in a photo, even if you just kick it all under the bed. PRO TIP: Unless your home looks like it belongs in the pages of Architectural Digest, get a hotel room for one night and shoot your boudoir stuff there. There is never any garbage in the background and you won't have to worry about someone judging your priceless collection of PEZ dispensers.

3. Get further away from the lens. Some newer phones have cameras with a dual-lens arrangement that allows for better portraits. These cameras use the longer lens (telephoto) to take advantage of the techniques long used by professional portrait photographers. They know that wide-angle lenses distort human facial features, making the nose bigger and reducing or even blocking the view of the ears. A longer lens forces you to get the camera further from the face and reveals more of the sides of the head and the ears. The reason this looks more natural is because when you use both of your eyes (binocular vision) to look at a three-dimensional face, your right eye sees their left ear and your left eye sees their right ear. Your brain marries the two images and what you see is what you expect to see in a photo. You can always shoot from further away and then crop the image to delete the non-essential background, but this also reduces the detail and resolution in the image, and very few people will go through the trouble of getting further away just to throw out most of the image. However, if you don't have a zoom- or dual-lens camera, this may be your best course of action. PRO TIP: If you DO have a camera with a zoom lens or interchangeable lenses, use the longest end of the zoom range. Anything above a 90mm equivalent* should work fine.

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