Author: Beatrice Bisais Page 17 of 32

You’ve probably heard it a hundred times, or even said it yourself. “Get my good side.” Most of us probably just think of it as a joke and allow ourselves to be photographed on whatever side we happen to be facing at the moment. Still, there are people who will change positions in a photo because they swear that they have a good side—and they won’t be caught dead posing with their “bad side” facing the camera. But how much truth is there to that? Do people really have a good side and a bad side?

Well, it turns out your position-changing friend may actually be onto something. Even the best looking people don’t have perfectly symmetrical faces, so there are always going to be very slight differences in the photos you take from each side. Many people know this already, but don’t use that knowledge when it comes to photos. If you look in the mirror, you might notice that when you smile, one corner of your mouth moves upward a little more, or one of your eyes closes slightly less. This is pretty normal, and though most people don’t really notice it, you do because you look at your face so often.

But that’s not all. It turns out that most people are perceived more favorably when they are photographed from the left side. A study found that people overwhelmingly prefer to look at the left side of other people’s faces in photographs. That even held true when the left side was mirrored to look like it was the right side. The study found that people’s left side tended to exhibit “a greater intensity of emotion.”

So you’re most likely going to look best photographed from your left, but that’s not 100% certain. Some people may legitimately look better from their right, so don’t give up hope if you think your right side is your best.

What you can do is check out your old photos and decide which side you think suits you best, and get some opinions from trusted friends. You probably have quite a few pictures from either side if you haven’t given it any thought until now. You can also hold a piece of paper up to cover half of your face while looking in the mirror. The side with the most upturned features (mouth, cheeks, eyebrows) is probably your “good” side.

So is your friend being a little dramatic when she moves to another position before you take a picture? Probably, but it does seem that she’s technically right about being photographed from a certain side.

No matter what side you’re standing on when a picture is taken, the best way to display it is always with a wifi cloud frame from Nixplay. Enjoy crystal clear picture quality for all your photos—not just those selfies from the left. Check out our selection of frames today and find the perfect one for you!

Beatrice Bisais

Bea is Nixplay’s Social Media Manager. She enjoys drinking coffee, reading about wars, and writing stories. Send her a message at beatrice.bisais@nixplay.com.

That special time of year is upon us once again, when families gather together to celebrate love, spend quality time with each other, eat delicious meals and…take lots and lots of photos together.

If there’s one season when even the most reluctant photographers among us pull out our smartphones and snap a few images, it’s during the holidays. There’s something so special about seeing everyone together, especially if you have family members who live far away.

To make sure you get the best pictures from this special time, here are some tips for making your holiday photos even better.

1. Start out with some standard poses to get everyone comfortable.

Whether it’s a professional photographer or you behind the camera, one of the best ways to get a good portrait of your family is to start with some standard poses.

You know the type: everyone bunches together or puts their arms around each other, and smiles on the count of three. These could very well end up being boring photos – in fact, they probably will be – but there’s a good reason to include them.

Most people feel a little insecure when they’re being photographed, and it can take a couple of minutes to loosen them up. By starting with poses that everyone expects, you give your subjects a moment to get cozy together and start talking and laughing, which is when you’ll get the really good shots.

One last note: make sure to take lots of photos to up your chances of having at least one great shot of everyone.

2. Allow for movement and playfulness.

Portraits don’t have to be posed. Especially when you’ve got kids in the family that you want to photograph, a candid portrait often says a lot more than one where everyone’s looking at the camera.

After you’ve shot the standard posed portrait, keep your camera handy while your family mills around on their way back to whatever it is they were doing. This can be a wonderful way to get some candid shots.

Another good tip is to ask the family members you’re photographing to do something together before you start shooting. Have the parents sit down and play with the kids, or ask your siblings to have a conversation with each other. As your subjects forget about the camera, you’ll see them relax back into themselves – and that’s an important element of any good photo.

3. Look for emotion, rather than perfection.

This tip comes from Babble contributor and photographer Me Ra Koh, who photographs families all across the country. When you’re taking holiday family photos, what you’re trying to capture is the warmth and love that are present. You don’t need a perfect composition, or even perfect focus, to do that.

When deciding which shots to keep, pay careful attention to any photos that show who your family really is, even if the shots feature some imperfections. If you can feel the love shining out at you, that photo is a keeper.

4. Photograph from a kid’s eye view.

The stars of holiday photos are almost always the kids. After all, the joy that appears on their faces as they decorate cookies, open presents, or play with friends and family is a beautiful, magical thing.

To really capture their perspective, get down on the floor and shoot from their eye level. You’ll find that you get pictures that are not only more intimate, but also more interesting.

Of course, all the family holiday photos in the world won’t do you much good if you don’t have a way to display them. A Nixplay Iris digital WiFi frame will let you show off as many photos as you like – you can even send them directly to the frame from your smartphone by using the Nixplay app.

Browse our Nixplay Iris colors, as well as our other digital frames, in the Nixplay Store.

Beatrice Bisais

Bea is Nixplay’s Social Media Manager. She enjoys drinking coffee, reading about wars, and writing stories. Send her a message at beatrice.bisais@nixplay.com.

Less than a generation ago, parents would spend hours compiling physical photographs of their families into thick photo albums. Depending on how crafty a mom or dad was, the album might be painstakingly organized and annotated, with notes dating every image – or, at the other extreme, a collection of random images jumbled together that you needed a guide (like mom or dad) to explain.

But these albums are gradually becoming a thing of the past. Like so much of the rest of our lives nowadays, our photographs mainly live online or on our various devices.

This has led to an issue that’s become common among everyone from college kids to grandparents: an overabundance of pictures.

When you’ve got a smartphone with a camera on you from morning till night, taking a photo is almost too easy. Parents have literally thousands of pictures of their children; frequent travelers have endless strings of photos from their trips; and grandparents find themselves bombarded with photos of their grandkids via email, text, and social media.

How do we navigate this new digital landscape without drowning in our own pictures?

Digital tools to preserve digital photos

As digital photography has become better, easier, and more popular, all kinds of tools have popped up to help people organize their images.

Online photo hosting sites let you get your pictures off your camera or laptop and into the cloud, organized into virtual albums.

Digital wi-fi cloud frames like the Nixplay Iris and the Nixplay Seed let you organize and display your images in playlists. You can even send pictures to the frame from anywhere in the world.

But this could be just the beginning of how our own photographic preservation techniques are changing, according to the NPR article “In the Digital Age, the Family Photo Album Fades Away. While many of us may still feel nostalgic for physical family photo albums, it’s likely that our children won’t have that same association.

They will have lived their entire lives in the digital age, when taking a picture means snapping a photo on a smartphone and being able to see it or share it immediately afterward. They’re used to scrolling through virtual albums on hard drives, phones, and social media sites. For them, a “family album” is more likely to be a hard drive that gets pulled out at holiday gatherings, or passed down from grandparents.

The NPR article quotes Clifford Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information on the way generational preferences and technology are changing the way we archive our pictures.

According to Lynch, children today will likely expect to be able to watch themselves grow up through digital albums and online. Physical photo books may document specific events, like a baby’s first year or a college graduation; however, the sheer volume of images that we all have now will make the kind of family albums that we held on to in the past impractical.

Becoming your own personal photo archivist

Admittedly, keeping track of your digital photos can be a lot harder than throwing all your hard copy photos into a shoebox.

This is because we split our pictures up onto so many devices, and so many platforms – you may have pictures on your phone, your Facebook and Instagram accounts, a cloud service like Google Drive, and a computer, just to name a few.

The first step, then, is to put all these photos together. The best way to do this is to use two external hard drives, one as an original and the other as a copy that you store with a family member or in another safe place away from your house. This way, you won’t lose all your pictures if disaster strikes your home.

Since you want to be able to actually see and enjoy your photos, too, a digital frame can be a perfect counterpart to your photo hard drive. With the Nixplay app, you can create photo playlists to serve as mini-albums.

There are all kinds of approaches you can take. If you have kids, consider creating a special playlist for each child, as a kind of digital baby book.

If you’re an avid traveler, divide your playlists up by trip, or by region of the world.

If you’re giving a digital frame as a gift, try creating playlists that document important moments you’ve spent together.

The family album may be slowly becoming a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean your photos are doomed to be hidden away on a hard drive forever. To find the Nixplay digital frame that fits your family, read our post “The Right Digital Frame for Every Type of Family.”

Beatrice Bisais

Bea is Nixplay’s Social Media Manager. She enjoys drinking coffee, reading about wars, and writing stories. Send her a message at beatrice.bisais@nixplay.com.