Professional headshots

The selection happens on a monitor at the end of the hour, with you in the room, rather than arriving as a gallery link three days later. That one change removes the worst outcome of a headshot session — discovering a week after the fact that none of the frames work, when the deadline has moved and the studio has gone. Ten retouched photographs, cropped for LinkedIn, for a company directory and for print, delivered within 48 hours. Same-day delivery is available when a deadline needs it.

On wardrobe: one step more formal than your workplace, in a solid mid-tone. Navy, charcoal, forest and burgundy all hold their colour on screen. Black closes up into a shape with a head floating on top of it, and white glows and pulls the eye off the face. Bring two options and decide in the studio against the actual background rather than guessing at home — the right answer depends on a background you have not seen yet.

Actor, realtor and LinkedIn headshots are the same hour with a different brief, and the difference is real rather than cosmetic. An actor’s headshot is shot tighter with less depth of field and delivered in the crop casting expects. A realtor’s runs looser, warmer and with room for branding to sit beside it. A corporate directory portrait is cleaner and more conservative than either, because it has to sit next to two hundred colleagues without standing out for the wrong reason. Say which you need at booking; the lighting is set before the session rather than fixed in editing.

What a headshot is actually judged on is whether you look like somebody worth replying to, and that is mostly the eyes and the jaw rather than the outfit. Two practical things help more than anything you can buy: get a proper night’s sleep beforehand, because nothing in retouching fixes tired eyes convincingly; and come straight from something that put you in a good mood rather than from a difficult meeting. It sounds soft and it is visible in every frame. From $295.