How to Take Best Selfie on Social Media

If you’ve been living in a tent on the tundra or under a rock in your backyard, you may not have heard the term “selfie.” In your defense, the term itself isn’t really that old – it was coined in 2005 as a way to describe a special kind of self-portrait. A selfie isn’t usually a carefully composed image of the photographer in his studio, taken with a tripod mounted camera on the timer setting (though it can be). “Selfie” usually refers to an image that is much more informal that that, generally taken with a digital camera or smart phone held at arm’s length, snapped on the fly and usually destined for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or some other form of social media.

Now you know what a Selfie is, but have you even taken a good one?

Now, I’m pretty sure everyone has taken one, even if it never left your hard drive. Now that smart phones have that great flip button that allows you to see exactly what you’re going to look like in a self-taken photograph, it’s hard to resist the temptation. And the selfie itself (minus its comparatively young moniker) is actually almost as old as photography. Before the advent of that little flip button photographers took selfies by cleverly positioning their cameras in a discrete (or sometimes indiscrete) location and then photographing their reflection in a mirror. Today’s cameras make this process a lot easier, and the prevalence of social media makes it almost a requirement to have at least one selfie you can use to mark your online territory.

So now that you know what I mean you may be thinking about all your friend’s selfies on their Facebook pages and realizing what a challenging little sub-genre this actually is. Because you’ve probably seen more bad selfies than good ones. And some of your friends may over-selfie to the point where you’d kind of like to just block them.

Taking a good selfie is an art. What’s more, knowing how many selfies to post and which selfies to use on what social media platform is a much higher form of art. Because selfies can be annoying to others, they can paint you as an egomaniac and they can just plain put people off. In fact, a 2013 study by the University of Birmingham discovered that posting too many selfies on Facebook was strongly correlated with “lower levels of social support and intimacy”. And yet, among people aged 18 to 24, selfies account for a whopping 30% of all the photos they take.