You've historically had trouble on Tinder. You only get likes from fatties and weirdos. Good quality matches come once or twice per month, and often don't even respond.

You lift, have some game, and are competent at dating. When you pick up a girl through non-app avenues you can take her out on a solid date or two and get laid. People casually complement you on your muscularity and your attractiveness. You know that your failures on Tinder don't reflect your SMV in reality.

You're failing on Tinder because your photos suck. You can try to fix this in one of two ways:

  1. Hire a professional photographer
  2. Become an amateur photographer yourself

Don't do option #1. It costs hundreds of dollars per shoot, and if the photos don't come out right you're screwed. Also, most good photographers will have their own artistic vision in mind when shooting you. Their vision probably won't be in line with the badass masculine vibe that you're going for (unless they're an equally badass photographer, in which case you probably can't afford them).

Go with option #2. Become an amateur photographer yourself.

This is just like lifting. You can pay $1000 for some shitty trainer to teach you a weak workout with light weights and cardio, or you can go online and find an intro guide to powerlifting and just do it yourself. Likewise, you can pay $600 to some girl or blue pilled photographer dude to take blue pilled photos for you. It'll work to some degree. You'll get photos showing off what a nice guy you are, and you'll get matches from passible 28 year old 7's who want you to settle down right away. But you want to bang the hot 20 year old 9's, so learn some basic photography skills and do it yourself.

Just like with lifting this takes research, real equipment, and more than a casual amount of effort. It pays off in proportion to the effort you put in.

Start by buying some gear:

The remote is key. Set up your camera on your tripod, walk over to where you're going to pose, and use the remote to trigger the shutter. Spend a few hours shooting and take literally 400 shots. You'll get maybe 1 or 2 good ones. When you're shooting yourself with a remote you can't know if your facial expression is retarded or if your pose looks goofy. Take a lot of scattershot photos and sift through them later.

You need the telephoto lens to get portrait photos with bokeh:

Portrait with Bokeh

Bokeh is where the background in a portrait is blurred. This helps highlight the subject. You can't help but focus your attention on the subject because the background is blurred to shit. Good self portraits often have some degree of bokeh.

On the flip side, you'll need a wide angle lens to get photos where the background is actually a feature. Here's a photo where the background was left relatively sharp because the scenery adds to the vibe:

Portrait with No Bokeh

You need a book on photography to learn about the basic camera settings on a DSLR, and how they effect the quality of your photos. There are three fundamental settings. Don't skip learning about these or your photos will come out looking like shit:

  • ISO (sensor sensitivity)
  • Aperture (how open the lens is)
  • Shutter speed (how long the photo is exposed for)

Shoot in RAW mode on your camera and post-process your photos in Photoshop. Read your photography book and learn how to adjust the following things in Photoshop. Don't skip learning about these or your photos will come out looking like shit:

  • Exposure correction
  • White point correction
  • Contrast correction
  • Color correction with curves
  • Sharpness correction with the "unsharp mask" tool
  • Blemish removal with the "spot healing" tool

Every photo is an art piece and should take you an entire day to shoot. It will take you five or six weeks to get enough photos for a full online dating profile. Like lifting, this takes effort and consistency.

Think of the photo of the dude on the bike. If you want to shoot this photo yourself you have to:

  • Shop for an outfit that matches that vibe you're going for.
  • Find a location.
  • Show up when the light is good.
  • Set up your tripod, camera, and bike.
  • Mess with the settings and lens choices.
  • Take a few hundred photos, move shit around, take a few hundred more.
  • Eat something, you're hungry.
  • Go home and upload your RAW shots to a computer.
  • Sift through 400 photos to find 1 good one.
  • Adjust the exposure, color, etc... Remove blemishes.
  • Start over and adjust everything again from scratch, because you don't really know what you're doing and you fucked up the first time.
  • Crop and post to Tinder.

It's an all-day project.

Women do so well on Tinder partly because they're doing this shit passively 24/7. Everywhere they go they're constantly taking selfies or having their friends shoot photos of them. They're addicted to it for the social media validation. They don't get stellar shots every time, but over the course of a few years they accrue a few exceptionally good shots for an attractive Tinder profile.

Men aren't as narcissistic. We're not constantly photographing ourselves and showing off online. If you want to do this right and have girl levels of attention on Tinder then you have to either start taking selfies 24/7 and bugging your dude friends to photograph you when you're out, or alternatively put in a condensed effort over a few weekends and just be done with it (I'd recommend the latter, since you're trying to be a Red Pill man and not a narcissistic 20 year old girl).

Remember to take photos that are congruent with who you are. Don't rent a bike just to take photos looking like a biker. If you're not a biker don't take photos with a bike. If you don't actually have a dog don't take photos with a dog. You might get some attention faking it, but when your date asks to see your bike or your dog and you can't produce the goods your chances of getting her into bed will go down to negative thirty thousand. Unless you can lie like a motherfucker, be congruent.

It doesn't matter what your hobbies are so long as you can show them off in an attractive way. If you’re wearing a muscle shirt and flexing then pretty much anything will come out looking OK (I take that back, no photos at a bronie convention).

At all costs, make sure your photos look bassass and masculine. Put some effort into planning them. Google around for inspiration, or look for inspiration as you go about your day. Don't take nice guy photos, they won't work.

The Tinder trifecta is Looks, Money, Status. Take artful high quality photos that convey one of each and you’re good to go.

Don't cheap out and try to take photos with your phone. You can't swap lenses on a phone for different effects like bokeh (actually, the new iPhone does have two lenses, but they’re not as flexible). Your phone also won't shoot in RAW mode, you'll only get JPEGs. You can't post-processes JPEGs effectively because they're already compressed to shit and don't have enough data left in them to properly correct exposure, color, white balance, and blemishes after the fact.

If you're on the broke side buy an old used camera, and old used lenses. A six year old DSLR camera you get for $120 is fine. You don't have to spend $800 on a new model with $1000 lenses. You're not shooting for Playboy, and you're not going to be able to tell the difference when viewing your photos from a phone anyway. Even a shitty old DSLR camera will give you infinitely more creative freedom than an iPhone.

Right swipes await.