Cheap Passport Photo Solution

Because I'm a cheapskate and don't really like to spend my money unless truly necessary, I decided to print my own passport sized photos instead of having to take a proper one in a shop. The cost for printing 4 passport sized photos here in Canberra, Australia is around $12 per set. And you won't even get to keep the soft copy to reprint more pictures in the future if you ever needed them.

So I went on to google and came across this website, http://www.epassportphoto.com/. It essentially helps you come up with passport sized photos according to your country's requirements. All you have to do is to select which country you're doing the passport photo for, browse for a picture that you want to use, crop the picture to ensure that your face is within the required boundary (all done on the website itself) and finally, download the picture. Now all that you need to do is to go to your nearest photo shop to get the picture developed.

I went to the cheapest store to get the cheapest prints I could get. Big W were offering 15 cent prints and I could hardly resist such a cheap offer. The only downside to this method is that you have to take your own photo and cut them up yourself.

Taking the photo is not too hard. All I had was my handy digital camera, a couple of books as a tripod, a well lit place and a photo editing software for editing the brightness, contrast and a bit of touching up. If you need a blue background photo, go invest in a blue cloth. And as for cutting up the photos, because they get developed in 4R sizes, I used a guillotine at my uni to cut up my pictures.

Here's a sample of a passport sized photo from epassportphoto.