A Good Corporte Headshot

What makes a good corporate headshot?

There are three key elements to a good corporate headshot. The first and this is the most important. How would you like people to see you and what message do you want your corporate headshot to send?

Remember, we live in a visual world where takes as little as a 10th of the second for us to form a judgement about a person, as proved by professor Todorov Princeton University. So in that tenth of a second - let’s be generous and stretch that out to 10 x longer, a whole second - people form a judgement about you. Either by the way you look, by your smile, by what you're wearing, the environment you’ve been photographed in or the context, which the photographs are being displayed. Those first impressions are being made and count. You need to think carefully about what you would like people to think when they see your photograph.

Secondly, a good corporate headshot needs to be composed correctly and have good lighting. The most crucial thing is; is it exposed correctly? The lighting could be natural daylight; it can also be taken with flash or ambient light. If you combine this technical aspect of photography to composition - which is the artistic element - and get it right you’ll have a good corporate headshot. Do you want the photograph to be a headshot would you like to be full length, do you want to be seen sitting at your desk or standing by the company logo? Is it a relaxed and informal portrait or are you trying to appear more serious? Say for instance if you are a firm of Lawyers, do the litigators want to come across differently to the lawyers who deal in family law?

Third and finally, and this is perhaps the most crucial point, the photograph needs to connect with the viewer. We've all seen photographs of business people, actors, TV celebrities and friends where they are simply staring wide-eyed at the camera. What this does is form a barrier between the viewer and the person in the photograph.

It stops the person viewing the photograph wanting to investigate any further because, as I said in point number one; we make snap decisions about what we like what we don't like.

However if the eyes are connecting with the viewer and that means the eyes are focused in the right place and if they eyes contain real emotion and show real personality, it takes the portrait to a new level and makes the viewer engage with the person in the photograph.

So that’s the 3 key elements good corporate headshot

There are other important factors to a good corporate headshot and I will be discussing those in a following post.

 

 

 

A Good Corporte Headshot