Glad you asked. In the corporate headshot world, a really good corporate headshot should be a great piece to a puzzle. This shouldn’t be something sticking out like a sore thumb on your website, or screaming at the bottom of your email. A well executed headshot fits in to the desired medium cohesively. Sometimes an interesting headshot background is JUST what the business doctor ordered. It creates depth, interest, and energy to your look.
Don’t try to get all cute and stand in front of things to add more subjects to your headshot background. Keep it clean! After all, you’re the star of the show, and you need to do your viewer a favor by making sure their eyes go where you want them to go. Clean/repeating backgrounds are excellent for a majority of platform uses. This can also help you get away with multiple forms of cropping you’ll inevitably experience.
The world of communication is constantly changing, and we need to stay on top of it like a dog on a squeaker toy. It can just be by popular use cases (radio -> TV -> online stream), or crowd our poor brains with additional equals (Business cards + Website + Email signature + LinkedIN).
Some platforms may come and go (RIP Magento Go and ProStores…but MySpace??), others will stick around to provide powerful tools to grow your brand. In a perfect world, we would have multiple variations of headshots to fit the many platforms we need to utilize. We realize that we need to find a happy medium and to be good stewards of resources when we take care of an organization’s corporate headshot needs.
I know I know, what a kill joy. Believe me, I am MORE than a common offender of this section, but stay with me as best you can. As exciting and speedy as shooting from the hip feels, this may end up costing you more in the long run. It’s easy too, I promise! We’ve got a brief list of common uses for headshots that you can plan ahead when figuring out the look you want! Once you know where these fun mug shots are going, the rest falls into place so nicely.
To see more about the difference in headshots between “on location” and our studio, feel free to click here.
