Why you really should upgrade your online profile image today

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Many clients send all their new staff members to my studio to make professional portrait photographs within days of starting. Since they are asked to work from home, it may be months before they meet their new colleagues face to face. It’s therefore vital that they have good, up-to-date portraits that can be used on the company intranet and website, for their Teams or Slack profiles, on Zoom or Webex, not to mention on LinkedIn and in their email signatures.

As more and more communication takes place online, the quality of our profile images is becoming ever more important. Who wants to present themselves as a faceless placeholder like the ones below? In this post, I’ll take a light-hearted look at some of the mistakes to avoid.

A professional portrait helps you to stand out among default profile images

A professional portrait helps you to stand out among default profile images

High-resolution

Gone are the days when a grainy 25kB profile image was the most that the platforms allowed. So show the world your smile in high-definition!

“What’s up with the Marketing Director? His profile image looks like it was taken in an airport photo booth in about 1980!”

The photographer should deliver an image file of at least 1000 x 1000 pixels, optimised for the web – that is, of not more than 250kB. Store this file safely as the master, then copy and resize it for each platform, using the maximum resolution allowed on that particular platform.

Keep it appropriate

Be certain to check and comply with any profile image guidelines issued by your employer – with regard to dress, for example. It’s also a good idea to take a look at the profiles of existing staff. You may want to express your personality, but you should probably avoid being the only member of the team who is seen raising a glass of piña colada in their profile picture.

“Whoa! I just got a call from Gary in accounts. Why does he have to show us so much chest hair?”

Consistency across platforms

Whether you’re a freelancer or work for a large organisation, growth in the number of platforms on which it’s necessary to maintain a profile shows no sign of slowing.

“Vanessa in sales has great profile pictures on all the platforms. But in some she’s blonde, in others brunette, and on Slack her hair is purple. It took me months to figure out they were all the same person.”

Make sure to get a really great portrait photograph that you love, and use it for all your profiles – at least, for all the professional ones.

How to organise a photoshoot for team headshots

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A recent full-day photoshoot at a client’s premises produced a great series of headshots, in large part thanks to excellent support from the organiser. I thought it might be helpful to others tasked with arranging similar shoots to run through some of the key good practices.

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Preparation for the shoot

Don’t leave it till the last moment to select and brief a photographer. You need time to be sure you’ve found the right one, and he or she needs time to understand your goals and requirements in detail, in order to plan and prepare the shoot.

In this case, my client contacted me a full two weeks in advance. We discussed availability and price, of course. But more importantly we clarified the key points that would enable her to plan the day with team members, and allow me to make decisions about my equipment and approach:

  • Timing – How much time would we need for each person? The 21 subjects were senior staff with busy agendas, so we had to allow for some flexibility, and I wanted to be sure that I’d have enough time to actually meet each person before I started photographing them. We agreed to allow a 20-minute slot per subject, and this turned out to be comfortable.

  • Style and mood – We settled on ‘professional, but open and approachable’ as the best summary of the image we wanted the headshots to project.

  • Framing – We agreed that I should aim to deliver four head and shoulders portraits per person, and where possible a couple of half-body ones as well, all shot in portrait (vertical) orientation.

  • Background – The client asked for a plain black background.

  • Location – They booked a large conference room for the day of the shoot. We arranged a video call a few days before, and I was grateful to my client for showing me the room. It was certainly large enough, but they would need to move some furniture to create an open space of about four metres by four metres.

Set-up and test shoot

Remember to allow up to half an hour for the photographer to set up. I brought a single studio light with an umbrella reflector, a standalone fill-shadow reflector, and a large cloth backdrop with stands and rail.

It took me about twenty minutes to get everything set up and positioned, but I still wasn’t ready for the first subject. First, I invited the organiser herself to pose for a short series of test shots. This is a crucial step. It allowed me to fine tune the settings, position and angle of my strobe light, and to review the tests shots with the client herself to be sure that the framings would give her the images she needed.

Relaxing the subjects

The organiser had briefed each subject to know more or less what to expect. This, combined with the relatively relaxed schedule, which gave me time to start up a conversation with each person before I began to shoot them, meant that they were all pretty comfortable in front of the camera – or, for the couple who obviously found the whole thing a bit stressful, at least more comfortable than they would otherwise have been. No one wept or ran away, and a number clearly enjoyed posing. I was impressed by how many expressed real gratitude to the organiser for arranging the shoot.

Are you photogenic?

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At least half of all the clients who come to me for portrait sessions introduce themselves by saying something like “I always hate myself in photos”, or “I’m sorry, but I’m just not photogenic”, or “I’ve never seen a portrait of myself that I like”.

This includes men and women that most people would find good-looking, or even gorgeous. Gently, I try to explore their feelings. If a client is worried about wrinkles, about circles under their eyes, or about a spot that just appeared that morning, knowing this gives me some guidance about the retouching that may be necessary in post-production, and I explain what I can and cannot do. It can also help me make appropriate choices with regard to shooting angles and lighting.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall

Frequently, however, a client will confess self-consciousness about a very specific feature of their face. Over the years, I’ve come to realise that this kind of anxiety usually has to do with a perceived lack of facial symmetry. “This is my good side”, people say, as if it was an incontrovertible and obvious fact, although it’s generally impossible to see why and they are rarely able to explain. I recently made portraits of a really beautiful young woman who was convinced that one of her eyes was smaller than the other, and found it hard to believe that I could not guess which one it was.

Few of us – perhaps none of us – have perfectly symmetrical faces. But because we see them in mirrors several times every day they are deeply familiar to us, and in the mirror they look normal. Now when someone sees their face in a photograph, the small asymmetries to which they have become accustomed in the mirror are not simply neutralised, they are reversed. In other words, to the person themselves they seem twice as large as they do to everyone else. I believe this may be the source of many people’s anxieties about their appearance.

I find all human beings fascinating and beautiful. I have always loved looking at people’s faces. As a portrait photographer, it’s my job to reveal each subject’s beauty. But I can do this most easily when they are confident and relaxed. Acknowledging and understanding their anxieties about their appearance, and convincing them that I love the way they look, is the basis of a successful portrait session.