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Offering a Passport and ID Photo service can provide a useful additional income, not only for photographic studios but also, for example, corner shops, newsagents, pharmacies and post offices.  In addition, offering Passport and ID Photos will encourage people to visit your premises where they may well purchase other items or services.

What do you need?

 A suitable camera, a plain light grey or plain cream background, a suitable lighting system and a printer that will print Passport and ID Photos. The Home Office Passport Service have a pdf publication offering guidelines for acceptable photographs, which is essential reading.

Camera

Although you can technically use any digital camera, we would recommend a digital SLR for quality and features. You could use a high-end DSLR, but consumer cameras such as the Canon 1000D or the Nikon D3100 are more than suitable.

Background

We would recommend using a proper background curtain or blind such as the 60cm x 90cm Passport Blind which can be fixed to a wall and rolled up when not in use thus saving space.

Lighting

The Home Office Passport Service guidelines are quite strict on lighting and shadows so photographic studio lights would be the perfect solution but can take up a lot of space (unless you have a studio). Using the built-in flash on the camera is an easier solution but can give rise to unacceptable shadows. One answer would be to use a regular hot-shoe flashgun with a suitable diffuser, but a better solution would be a ring-flash, such as the Marumi DRF 14 which is readily available from several retailers.

Printers and Setups

There are three basic setups for printing ID and Passport photos.

The simplest setup is to use a stand-alone printer where you would take the card from the camera and print direct from the printer using the printer's built-in card reader and software. Examples of stand-alone printers are the HiTi S420, the HiTi P510S, the HiTi P510K, the HiTi P110S Portable Printer, the Mitsubishi Easy Photo System with ID Module and the Mitsubishi Click Lite SystemYou can also attach your camera by USB lead to some of the printers (for example the HiTi S420) which means you can load the pictures direct from the camera without having to take out the card. The HiTi P110S Portable Printer has this feature and is an ideal solution where space is at a premium as you can actually carry it over your shoulder!

A more professional approach would be to process the pictures on a laptop through dedicated ID & Passport Photo Software  such as IdPhoto Pro4, before printing. In this instance you could use either of the above methods to transfer the pictures into the software or you could even transfer the pictures using wireless camera equipment. The benefit of using dedicated ID & Passport Photo Software, apart from ease of use and functionality, is that you can use any printer connected to your laptop, rather than printers with a specific ID and Passport Photo function.