A Better Headshot

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This is a bad headshot…

…and this is a good one.

These photos were taken minutes apart, and I shot the one on the left (as much as it pained me) to illustrate a point. Objectively speaking, it’s a bad picture—the sort you get when it’s time for a new headshot, so your coworker grabs his phone and tells you to stand over there and smile. It’s an awkward experience for both of you, and the result is crude and clumsy and unfit for professional use.

What’s wrong with it, exactly? Geez, where to begin! The light is uneven across the face, but not in a way that’s intentional, interesting, or pleasing, and his eyes are dark and dead. His skin, freshly tanned (burned?) from a trip to Mexico, has a slight “hand me a glass of milk ‘cause I just ate a whole jalapeño” look to it. The background is a bit bright relative to the subject and overly detailed, and both the pose and expression are stiff. Even the composition needs work. In short? It’s a snapshot, not a headshot.

The second picture is the sort of result you can expect from a professional photographer. Most of the fix was done at the time of capture using supplemental lighting on the subject (notice in particular how the catchlights bring the eyes back from the dead), and proper camera settings for a good exposure and blur amount on the background. A little posing direction and easy conversation kept the subject from looking wooden, like the bespectacled telephone pole in the first image. Afterward, in the edit, the red skin tone was adjusted and some other light retouching was done, including global and local adjustments to color, contrast, etc.

If your headshot looks more like the first image than the second, it’s probably time for not just an update, but an upgrade. The way we present ourselves matters, especially in a professional context—a headshot on LinkedIn or your company’s website is often the first look anyone gets at you. Which above version would you rather they see?

If I can help, please send an email my way. Or contact another photographer you may know! Either way, the important thing is to shelve that current headshot if it’s working against you. Good luck out there, and thank you for reading.

BTS: Amanda Knox PR Collateral

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Three years ago, I had the good fortune to photograph Amanda Knox for an article in Der Spiegel about her life at the time. You never really know what to expect from a subject when you show up for a shoot, but I wasn’t surprised to find that both Amanda and her husband, Christopher, are incredibly welcoming, engaging, and thoughtful people. And funny! It was a total pleasure getting to know them a little bit over the course of the shoot, and when it was over, I realized I’d’ve been more than happy to keep it going.

Fast forward nearly three years. Out of the blue, I was delighted to hear from them—they needed to update their headshots for their myriad endeavors. What endeavors, you ask? Well, Amanda gives frequent interviews and talks, her new book Free is coming out in March, their Hulu miniseries will be released this year, their podcast Labyrinths is a popular and fascinating listen, and if all that were not enough, they also perform standup comedy. And those are just the things I know about.

Long story short, I got to spend another lovely day at their place with them, their producer Andre, my longtime friend and frequent assistant Josh, and our hair and makeup stylist Lindsey. A huge thank you to all these wonderful people. Here’s a little BTS, courtesy of Josh.

New Year, New You!

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Happy new year! Yep, it’s a new year and a new you, and I’ll just go ahead and guess that you could use a new headshot to reflect that fact. That ten-year-old photo you’re using on LinkedIn? Maybe you’ve kept it so long because your hair was perfect that day, or because you were ten pounds lighter back then, or just because being photographed makes you feel like a cat being petted in the wrong direction and you dread the experience. Whatever the reason, let’s be honest. That’s just not you anymore, and you know what that means: it’s no longer a good headshot.

The reason headshots are important is that they’re often the first impression anyone ever gets of us, or our company. You need a good one—current, yes, but also one that reflects who you are. Get in touch, and let’s talk about what you need. Natural or creative and stylized? In studio or on location? Headshots can take any number of forms, and what’s right for you may not be right for someone else. I’m prepared to guide you through the process and get you a brand new picture you’ll love and want to keep for the next ten years. And I promise—you’ll be surprised how easy and downright entertaining a shoot can actually be.

BMW Northwest Life cover shoot

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I love editorial photography. The work is creative, the subjects are interesting, and the conditions are unpredictable. You just never know how it’s going to go, so you have to be ready to let go of preconceived notions and roll with the punches. Those punches can come in many forms. Sometimes the punch is that the subject can only give you ten minutes instead of the hour you thought you had. Sometimes it’s a sudden rain shower, or a broken strobe, or a bored security guard. Whatever it is, you have to take it in stride, figure it out, and move forward.

In this case, the punch was a car. The cover of the magazine was to be an environmental portrait of Manfred Scharmach, owner of BMW Northwest, with his gorgeous 1939 BMW 327/28. Full disclosure, I don’t know anything about cars. I can fill the gas tank and change a tire, and I know you don’t want frozen wiper fluid lines on a cross country road trip in the dead of winter, but that’s about it. I do appreciate a beautiful design when I see it though, and this car shook the Dick Tracy loving child in me wide awake.

In our conversations about the cover image, Lori Randall (Randall PR) had in mind a rural setting—trees, sky, maybe even some water somehow. We’d picked several spots near the dealership to scout ahead of time and I checked them out on Google’s street view. On the morning of the shoot, Lori and I and Uly, my assistant, visited a couple locations and picked our favorite: a grassy lot with trees in the background, very Pacific Northwest. By the time we’d be shooting, the sun would be in just the right spot for a late morning rim light. Plans!

So back to the punch: the car wouldn’t start, and there was no way to get it from the storage garage to the location we’d chosen. While Manfred kicked himself for not trying the car the week before, we looked for another option. Lori adjusted to the situation brilliantly, and we all quickly agreed that the wall of the garage was perfect. It didn’t say rural, of course, but its two-tone paint scheme echoed the car’s and once the BMW was pushed halfway along the building to the right spot, the background was beautifully broken up by the shadow of a tree. I knew the sun on Manfred would be a problem and we were ready to break out the scrim to deal with it, but once the strobe with the octabank was in place, it acted as a flag and did the job for us.

We shot away and Manfred did a wonderful job of letting go of his frustration. In the end, Lori and I were both super happy, especially given the circumstances. The results were objectively great and the shot even looks intentional. It wasn’t what any of us had envisioned, but sometimes that’s how it goes. Curveballs! Isn’t photography fun?

BMW Northwest Life magazine with location portrait of Manfred Scharmach on the cover.

Who Wore It Better?

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If you’ve ever met me or read any of my blog entries, you probably know that I believe photography is one of the best jobs in the world, and that I consider myself seriously lucky to be doing it professionally. Sometimes a portrait subject will ask what I’d do for work if I didn’t make pictures, and I honestly don’t know what to say. I can’t imagine breaking up with photography, or cheating on it with some floozy of a tech job. That said, however, it’s also true that like any relationship, the light can go out if you don’t occasionally stoke the fire. I don’t know any photographers, regardless of how much they love creating images, who don’t need to recharge their creative batteries from time to time with a personal project. So, it was in that keep-the-fires-lit spirit that I undertook the surprisingly entertaining extracurricular project of ruining classic paintings by inserting my face into them.  The process is pretty simple, but requires lots of attention to detail:

1.  Settle on a painting you'd like to debase. If you’re like me, the problem won’t be finding a painting you like; it’ll be narrowing it down.
2.  Photograph yourself. Obviously, it's crucial that the position of your head match the position of the portrait subject's head.  If you're off by much at all, you'll have problems when you get into Photoshop.  It's also necessary to match the lighting in the painting as closely as possible. Your facial structure will almost certainly be different than the portrait subject’s, so the shadows may not look the same and you may have to cheat the light around a little, but make sure the quality of the light is as close as you can make it. Last, try not be wildly amiss with your camera angle and lens focal length.
3.  Cut your face out (in Photoshop, I mean!) and put it into the painting.  Because everyone's head is shaped differently, odds are good that your face won't map perfectly over the existing one.  Parts of the face from the original painting will likely peek out from behind yours, so expect to clone the painting a bit to make it look right.  Color, contrast, etc. won't match either, so that will all have to be adjusted.  You'll also need to steal some texture from elsewhere in the painting and lay it over top, and you'll need to run some combination of filters (and probably the smudge tool) to make your face look less like a photo and more like it's part of the painting.  Frankly, I haven't done a perfect texture job on any of these images, but I've done it well enough to be happy.

And here are the images!  As always, click on any you'd like to see larger.
First is Ingres's 1811 portrait of Charles-Joseph-Lauren Cordier.  This was at the top of my list to try because it’s the cover image for my well-worn, unabridged copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, which I have fond memories of reading on trains while passing through Europe at the tender age of 19.  It's a pretty thrilling story. A sailor is arrested on his wedding day and falsely imprisoned in a grim island fortress for fourteen years, at which time he’s finally able to make a daring escape, recover the vast fortune left to him by a fellow inmate, and exact revenge on the men who conspired to destroy his life. You haven’t read it? Then what are you reading this for?! Get off your ass, get down to the library, and get back on your ass and read it.  And don’t try to cheat and watch a film adaptation, either—they've never made a good one.

The book begins during Napoleon’s exile, just before his return to power, so naturally I started looking at Napoleon.  This romantic portrait by Jacques-Louis David in 1801 was the first of five versions of Napoleon Crossing the Alps, and it's the one I liked the best. It strikes me as gleefully over the top.

That, of course, made me want to tackle the realistic version of the scene, as painted by Paul Delaroche in 1850.  In 1849, Delaroche was visiting the Louvre with a nobleman who had a large Napoleonic collection, and who commented on the implausibly grandiose depiction of the scene in David's painting. That’s right—he thought it was OTT too.  So, he commissioned Delaroche to paint a more likely representation of the crossing, with Napoleon on a mule.  (Incidentally, Delaroche didn't intend for the image to be at all belittling.  He was apparently a Napoleon fan, and didn't believe that his depiction in any way takes away from the achievement.)

Ingres again.  I came across this one while looking for the portrait of Cordier, and I'll be completely honest—I was drawn to this painting because of the hair.  Well, yeah…the sword too…but mostly the hair.  Mine is so fine and lifeless (like Scarlett Johansson—snap!), but Ingres' childhood friend Amédée-David, le Comte de Pastoret?  He had some of the best hair I've ever seen.

Fun, right? Yes, it absolutely is, but In all seriousness, it’s also quite a useful technical exercise. Photographers have studied and emulated and just plain ripped off classic paintings by Old Masters since the inception of photography, and for good reason. Because if you’re going to borrow, borrow from the best. I was delighted to look through centuries-old European paintings again—reacquainting myself with some, discovering others—and it’s edifying to examine lighting to the extent necessary to recreate it. If you’re a photographer, I’d recommend it even more than reading The Count of Monte Cristo.