"I should warn you, I'm terrible in photos."
Someone says a version of that to me almost every week, usually before we've even sorted out a date. It is universal across the board, from new starters to the senior executives who run rooms full of staff without a second thought. Then a camera appears and something in them changes.
The reality is they're not terrible in photos. It is just that nobody has ever stood in front of them and told them what to do. That's not their job. It's mine.
Which is why, if I'm honest, the photo is the easy part.
What my sessions are actually for
By the time you get your images, two working days later, the work is already done. It happened in the room before you saw a single frame, and as you saw each change that we made together.
So what am I doing in that time? I'm settling the nerves first, because a tense face reads as a tense face and no amount of editing fixes it afterwards. I'm telling you where to put your hands, what to do with your chin, where your weight sits, which way to turn your shoulders, small specific directions one at a time so you never once have to wonder whether you're doing it right. And I'm watching for the moment you forget the camera is there and look like yourself again. That's the frame I want.
People sometimes joke it's part therapy. I wouldn't go that far. But they're not completely wrong either, because most of what I do is get someone to stop thinking about the camera and just be in front of the lens.
So, are professional headshots worth it?
Here's my honest answer. A professional headshot is worth it when the person taking it does the part you can't do for yourself. It isn't when they don't. That's the whole difference, and it's worth understanding before you spend anything.
A headshot does a job you're not there to do yourself. Someone lands on your profile, or your firm's website, or an email you've sent to a stranger, and they decide something about you before you've said a word. You want that decision to go your way.
The file that does that is easy to make once the person in it is relaxed and looking like themselves on a good day. Getting them there is the hard part, and it's the part worth the money. Not the camera. Not the lighting, clever as it is. The coaching.
This is also why the cheap version doesn't work
You can get a face made by an AI now, or shot in two minutes at a studio that runs 40 people through before lunch.
An AI can generate a face. It can't see that you look tense, or that your smile doesn't match your eyes. A studio on the clock can take a sharp, well-lit photo of someone who plainly wishes they were somewhere else. The thing that makes the image actually work is the one thing neither of them offers.
So no, you're not really paying me for a photo. You're paying me to make it easy to look like yourself on a good day. The photo is just what you get to keep.
If that's the headshot you're after, let's find a date. You can see the kind of work it produces on my business headshots page, and there's more about how I work if you'd like it first.
