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.