Tutorial Tuesdays: How To Take A Good Nail Picture

Now, I'm most definitely not an expert when it comes to taking a good nail photo, and mine could still do with improvement (a decent camera for a start), but I have picked up a lot of tips along my way that have made my nail pictures better.

This is one of my favourite recent manis that I posted on my Instagram page, and I think I captured the design well. I'll go through the steps I take to get the best picture possible with the resources I have. 

STEP 1: Don't have your nails too close to the camera (unless you are doing a macro or close up). Having your hand too close to the camera is likely to make the picture blurry and your followers/readers may not be able to see the whole design properly or at all, which is a bummer.

 STEP 2: Don't have your nails too far away from the camera. Again, this can make the picture blurry, but even if it does focus you won't show your nails at their best. You need to find a mid-point that shows off your beautiful nail designs and also allows your camera to focus properly. I find it best to take a few pictures and then go through them, deleting the 'not good enough' ones and then choosing from the decent ones. 

STEP 3: Check your lighting. This is possibly the most important thing to think about when it comes to nail pictures. If your lighting isn't right, your nails won't look right- simple. This is the worst lighting I could get in my house without it being pitch black, so it may be a bit extreme but it gives you an idea. With the poor lighting, you can't see the design on the nail, and there is no way you will give a true representation of colour, effect etc. of the polish if your lighting isn't right. This doesn't just include dark lighting, you can also have bad artificial lights, so try to get daylight pictures as much as you can. 

STEP 4: Get your pose right. If you have a funny pose, your nails just won't look right. The most common poses include ones with one of the bottles used (below), a similar pose without the bottle and a pose with your 4 fingers almost 'lined up' along an invisible horizontal line (I'm not sure how else to explain that one). Whichever works best for you, use it. I change it up personally, but if you want to have a permanent pose (or even create your own) then that's a good thing to do too. Take all of these points into account when you take your next nail picture and see the difference it makes.