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The organizational structure of Lookbetteronline.com is a little different. Ross Jacobs, director of services for Lookbetter, says his photographers "believe that we are offering a service that really helps people to find their significant others. They believe in it so much that they've agreed to greatly reduce the prices of their sessions to work with us because they really feel a great need in the community for a service like this."

There are no contracts at Lookbetter, and on-location photographers are welcome. Rather than booking through a studio, customers select individual photographers through the website after searching by ZIP code. A 45-minute basic session costs $149, which customers pay online at Lookbetteronline.com. Once the photographer uploads photos from the shoot to Lookbetter's online platform, he or she receives $60 for a studio shoot and $75 if the shoot is on location. Intrigued by the idea of an on-location session, for my portraits I searched Lookbetteronline.com and chose a photographer based in New York (where I live) named Melody Reed.

"Stop right there," Melody told me. We were walking the curve around Columbus Circle heading toward Broadway, and a wall of silver metal had caught her eye. "I love texture," she explained, her camera clicking rapidly as she motioned for me to turn my face to the left. At first I stood awkwardly offering her half smiles -- it was bizarre to be the center of attention, and I could feel the eyes of passerby upon me. But Melody's enthusiasm for the images she was capturing relaxed me. "You're beautiful!" she exclaimed. "Sometimes I don't see the full beauty in people until I'm looking through my camera lens."

My confidence bolstered, we meandered for several blocks, pausing intermittently to get shots against different backgrounds: a light post, a brick wall, a tulip garden. It was a windy day, and my long hair whipped around in the breeze. I joked that we wouldn't have gotten the windblown effect in a studio, and asked Melody, who does about three shoots a week for Lookbetter, why she doesn't have one. "I have this billion-dollar studio," she told me, gesturing to the city around her. "It inspires the client more," she said. "In a studio it's hard to simulate natural relaxing."

One of the tricky things about shooting for online dating is walking the line between professional and artificial.

"Lookbetter doesn't want shots in a real studio because it looks posed," says Anita Zvonar, a Canadian-based commercial photographer who shoots online dating portraits for Lookbetter as "sort of a nice little break from the pressures of my other photo jobs."

Though Zvonar shoots primarily on location for her commercial work, her online dating portraiture clients come to her home studio, where she creates shots that are as un-studio-like as possible. She'll use a reflector instead of standard lighting, or have a client sit on her "funky leather couch." She'll coordinate an outfit to a setting, but tries not to be "overly creative" with her angles.

However, Zvonar doesn't think clients mind if the shots look a little posed; she thinks it's becoming more acceptable to get portraits made for online dating purposes, that the older generation of online daters are "just being honest" about presenting themselves as well as possible. "They have money, and they're fine admitting they need to make an effort," she says.

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