What Makes a Good Professional Headshot

Soft and directional, coming from slightly to one side and slightly above. That shapes the face and gives it dimension.

Flat frontal light makes a face look wide and lifeless; overhead office lighting puts shadows in the eye sockets and under the nose, which reads as tired regardless of how you feel. A single large window beats a whole ceiling of fluorescents.

Clean and non-competing. Either genuinely plain, or blurred far enough that nothing in it is identifiable.

A background where a viewer can read a poster or count the bookshelves is a background stealing attention from the face. The test is simple: if you notice the background before you notice the person, it is wrong.

The hardest of the three, and the one that separates good from adequate. A held smile looks held.

What you want is an expression caught between instructions, during conversation — which is the photographer’s job to produce, not yours to perform. Nobody produces a natural expression on command, so sessions are run as a conversation and the frames that work come between the directions rather than during them.

Shooting from below. A camera positioned lower than the subject emphasises the underside of the chin and jaw. Eye level or very slightly above is correct, which is why phone selfies held at chest height rarely work.

Using portrait mode as a substitute. Computational blur still produces soft, artificial edges around hair and glasses that are obvious at anything larger than a thumbnail — and a LinkedIn profile viewed on a desktop is considerably larger than a thumbnail.

Cropping a headshot out of a wedding photograph. It is the most common source of professional portraits and it never quite works. The lighting was for a room, the crop is wrong, and there is usually a stray arm.

Leaving it four years. Appearance changes, roles change, and a portrait that no longer looks like the person who walks into the meeting is worse than no portrait.

Bring two or three solid-colour tops ranging from lighter to darker. In a headshot the visible area is essentially neckline, shoulders and collar, so those details carry more weight than the rest of the outfit.

Avoid tight patterns, which can produce moiré, and anything with a visible logo. Necklines you feel comfortable in matter — a collar you keep adjusting will show up as fidgeting in the frames.

Bring what you would actually wear to meet a client. A headshot in a suit for someone who never wears one reads as a costume, and clients notice the mismatch when they meet you.

A leadership page where every portrait was taken in a different year, in a different place, at a different crop and against a different background looks disorganised — regardless of how good each individual photograph is.

The fix is a single session with a fixed station: same background, same lighting, same distance, same crop, same orientation for everyone. About ten minutes per person once the setup is built, so a team of twenty fits in a morning.

For organisations that hire regularly, record the exact setup — background, subject distance, camera height, light position — so new starters can be matched later rather than triggering a full re-shoot.

A headshot answers "what does this person look like". A branding session answers "what does this business look like", and they are very different purchases.

A branding session runs two to four hours and produces a library: you working, your hands on the actual craft, your space, your products, close details, and wide frames with room for text overlay. It exists to supply a whole website and a year of social content rather than one profile picture.

The businesses that benefit most are the ones where the owner is the brand — realtors, salon owners, trainers, caterers, tradespeople, consultants and makers. When the buying decision involves trusting a person, photographs of that person doing the work are the highest-return images a business can commission.