What types of pictures to include on an online dating website.

Some themes for good pictures

Pictures of you standing in front of an old brightly colored wall with dramatic texture. This is my personal favorite type of online dating portrait shot. It’s amazing what a nice bright texture can do for your picture. As you go about your day, keep an eye out for brightly colored buildings and try to think of an outfit you own that matches the color scheme.
Pictures of you in a suit. I strongly recommend that you place a picture of you in a suit as your second or third picture. Not your first! That said, almost all women actively express interest in men in suits. Countless research shows that groomed men in suits get more respect, appear more confident, and more intelligent than a man without a suit.
Pictures of you doing what you love. Whether you play an instrument or climb mountains, we all admire people who have a passion for something. But don’t just take a picture of your guitar. Post picture of yourself playing the guitar.
Pictures of you at a mixed sex social gathering. Healthy social humans like to be around lots of people. Any picture of you out-and-about, doing your thing, is a sign of a socially calibrated person.
Pictures of you celebrating your birthday party.
Picture of you and your friends during a Halloween party. Women love costumes. But it’s important in this context that your photograph shows you in costume, as well as , other people in costume. If you just post a picture of you all dressed up, with no background except your bathroom mirror, then you just look like a weirdo who likes to play with makeup.
Pictures of you at a New Years Eve party. I call such pictures “Age Indicator Pictures.” Because, well, they indicate what you looked like at the date of the picture. For example if your picture depicts you at a New Year’s party, with the words 2009 written on a banner on the ceiling, then she at least knows what you looked like on that date.
Pictures of you accomplishing a goal. Have you ever climbed a mountain and took a picture? Have you ever built a snowman? Have you ever surfed a perfect great wave? Post it.
Pictures of you at work. If you’ve got a cool job then it might make for a good picture. Who hasn’t stopped to watch an artist, a sculptor, an engineer, or a carpenter working at his trade?
Pictures of you as a baby. Both men and women are programmed to respond to baby faces. Reportedly, it’s an evolutionary response which encourages the rearing of our posterity. Note that this phenomenon also applies to young animals too. Hence the lure of stuffed baby tigers, pandas, and kittens (e.g. the multi-million dollar stuffed animal business).
Pictures of you and your mom. Women the world over often evaluate a man based on how good he treats his mother. After all she was the first woman in your life.
Pictures of yourself standing in front of a locally recognized hotspot (e.g. Trendy clubs, famous statues, hip coffee shops, fancy restaurants, or famous buildings). If you want to get a local girlfriend, then one way to make her comfortable is to display yourself in front of landmarks that she is already intimately familiar with.
Pictures of you and your male friends going out. Despite their constant complaining, women actually expect you to have a crew of male friends whom you care about, go out with, and respect. And, it is in her evolutionary interest to mate with men who have a considerable amount of competent allies.
Pictures of you with your little cousin. In an experiment in which men were shown reacting positively to a baby (rather than ignoring it) women viewing the clip reported the attendant men as more attractive. (Buss, David. “The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies Of Human Mating.” Basic Books , 1995: p. 104.)
Pictures of you playing sports. Do you play soccer, mud football, or have shots of yourself hitting a baseball in your uniform? Use them.
Pictures of you and your family. Healthy people tend to have healthy families. “In our long lost evolutionary history (about 50 years ago), a woman’s involvement with a man often necessarily meant that she would be heavily involved with his entire family. Imagery of you with your healthy and prosperous family still has an evolutionary lure. Given two sexual prospects who appear to display equal fitness, the one whose relatives appear healthier, brighter, more attractive, more fertile, and more successful probably has higher actual fitness. Since our ancestors tended to live in kin groups, there were plentiful opportunities for mate choice to take into account this sort of kin quality. Our mate choice systems would have evolved to exploit this gold mine of genetic information.” (Miller, Geoffrey. “The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature.” Anchor Books, 2001: p. 219.)
Pictures of you in far off lands. Try to avoid posting stereotypical tourist shots. For example, don’t post a picture of you and your brother standing directly in front of the Parthenon with stupid grins on your face. Instead, try to take pictures with actual international people in them – preferably doing something that is culturally associated with the country you’re travelling in. Instead of taking a picture in front of the Coliseum in Rome, take a picture of you and a crazy group of Italian students you met – while you were perhaps sitting down to a large spaghetti dinner. Matt Harding, the man behind the famous internet viral video “Where the hell is Matt,” travelled the globe photographing himself dancing in front of the world’s monuments. But he noticed that his videos were much better when the indigenous people got involved. He writes, “initially…it was just me travelling around dancing in front of famous monuments – the postcards we all know. And, after a while, that started getting kind of boring…I mean we’ve all seen these places before…But about half way through making the second video, I went to Rwanda and I danced with a bunch of kids in a village…and I had a very energy efficient idea — which was that that was really a whole lot more interesting than dancing in front of the postcards – dancing with people. Me dancing by myself, not that interesting. Other people doing different things all over the world, really really interesting.”
Body modification, like tattooing and scarification, has been practiced by nearly every society since the Neolithic Era. If you’ve got a tattoo or a cool scar, don’t be afraid to show it. Dr. Rob Burriss of the University of Liverpool conducted a study in 2008 in which women were shown images of men’s faces – some had facial scars. Surprisingly, the women actually found the scarred men more attractive. Burris wrote, “Women may have rated scarring as an attractive quality for short-term relationships because they found it be a symbol of masculinity, a feature that is linked to high testosterone levels and an indicator of good genetic qualities that can be passed on to offspring. The assumption that scarring is a sign of bravery…” So don’t be afraid to take pictures that contain scars or tattoos – so long as you don’t have to take off your clothes to do so.

When to take pictures

Keep snapping that camera!

One way to amass a large cache of site-worthy photographs is to simply make sure that you always have your camera with you. You just never know when a great Kodak moment may come up. And when you’re out with your friends (in restaurants, nightclubs, or just cruising downtown) get them to keep taking lots of pictures of you. Two hundred photos would be an absolute minimum to start with. If your buddy gets annoyed, treat him to free drinks for the night. Or take shots for him too – and you can both start your online adventures at the same time.

“Golden Hour” photography

The human face usually photographs well when it is immersed in diffused, soft and even lighting. Early mornings, late afternoons, or early evenings are the best times for outdoor portrait photography. Portraits look particularly dramatic during the “golden hour” – (sometimes called the “magic hour”). This is the first and last hour of sunlight during the day – when a luminescent photographic effect is achieved because of the position of the sun.

Golden Hour in Bangkok

Figure 14 – Golden Hour in Bangkok, Thailand.

A word on male body shots

If you look through the male profiles of any internet dating website, you’ll see countless examples of men who fill their pages with pictures of themselves in various states of undress. As a man, we are used to being constantly stimulated by images of the female body. So it is no wonder that we assume that women are excited by the same.
But the sad truth is, even if you spend eight hours in the gym every day, and you have rock hard abs of steel, photographing them is probably not helping you much.

In a study conducted by the Center for Addiction and Mental Health at the University of Toronto, Dr. Meredith Chivers measured genital blood flow of women asked to watch images of naked men engaged in various activities. In her research, heterosexual women were no more excited by watching athletic naked men doing yoga, or tossing stones into the ocean, than they were by watching videos of mountain tops.
In the Match.com study conducted by Dan Ariely, Günter J. Hitsch, and Ali Hortaçsu of the University of Chicago, a man’s weight barely registered at all as a predictor of how many emails a man would receive. Height was much more important than weight.
In a study conducted by Dr. Ross King of the School of Psychology at Deakin University, men were asked to specify the amount of muscle mass that they think a woman prefers. The result was an image of a very muscular man. But when woman were asked to specify the size of their preferred mate, their ideal was far less muscular than the model chosen by the men.

This is not to say, however, that women are never turned on by male physique. But it does indicate that women are generally not very excited by the male physique of strangers . Think of it this way. What do you often see when you walk into a teenage girls room? Usually posters featuring movie stars like Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom. Now these men may be quite attractive, but they also have astronomically high social value. It’s usually not enough for a girl to simply hang up some random “pretty boy.” He has to have a “name” as well.
Contrast this observation with that of what you see when you walk into a college dorm room filled with four guys. Often the walls are littered with pictures of bikini-clad blonde models. However, when you ask for the name of any particular model, most guys will simply shrug their shoulders.
The point being, female attraction circuitry is simply stimulated in a manner different than the male equivalent. She needs to see more than your body. She needs to see your heart, mind, and soul too.

“Men find women in tight-fitting and revealing clothing more attractive than fully clothed women as dating partners and sex partners, but not as marriage partners. Women, in contrast, judge men in tight-fitting and revealing clothes to be less attractive than fully clothed men in either case, perhaps because relative undress signals that the man is primarily interested in short-term sex.”(Buss, David. “The Evolution Of Desire: Strategies Of Human Mating.” Basic Books , 1995: p. 118.)