Passport Photo

The following tips may help you when you are in a rush for a passport size picture (2’ x 2’), especially if you are living in a place like Socorro, where there is only photo studio and the turn-around time is usually around a week. When I was looking for a person who could take a picture in town, no one pointed me to Wal-Mart. Most of us don’t know that we can use the services of the KODAK Picture kiosk in Wal-Mart photo center. It is really cheap ($0.28 for 6 copies) and we can get the prints within a minute. It helps owning a digital camera or you can borrow one from your friends.
1. Take a picture with a nice smooth background that contrasts your dress. Please make sure that you don’t use a rugged background. I feel that the walls in our school and my home are coarse. One can notice the gradients.
2. Hanging a plain cloth in the background helps to make the background soft and smooth.
3. Using a photo editing software, you can choose the part of picture that you want in the passport photo ID. The KODAK Picture kiosk also has an image editing tool for this purpose. For better quality make sure that the resolution of the picture is at least 300 dpi. (most of the software use a default of 72 dpi). Also, try to save the file as a tiff file.
4. Choose ‘picture id’ option in the KODAK Picture Kiosk. It is all user-friendly after that. You will get your passport picture id in minutes.


I followed the above steps 2 weeks ago. Then, I sent those pictures for visa application and got it approved.