What You’re Doing Wrong With Your Professional Headshots

Your professional headshot is not just a picture of you. It has a job to do. That image has to go out and make connections with potential employers, potential clients, and potential collaborators before you ever walk in the room. If you are getting it wrong, you could be leaving a lot of opportunity on the table.

The first thing to get right is what you are wearing. This is not about wearing a costume. It is about playing to the audience you are trying to connect with.

If you are going after a role at a casual tech startup, showing up in a suit and tie might actually work against you. To that room, that might read as stuffy. Team dynamics matter, and people need to look at your headshot and feel like you would fit in. Flip the script and you are going for a board-level executive role, then a suit and tie is exactly right.

The good news is you can do multiple outfit changes in a single session, covering everything from casual to fully executive. Before you come in, think about where you are going to use these images. A company website, a trade publication, a business card. Dress appropriately for each situation.

Drive around your city right now and look at billboards, bus ads, business cards, and websites. You can tell immediately when someone was not being genuine in front of the camera. They do not feel like themselves. They feel like they were performing what they thought a headshot was supposed to look like.

We are trained from childhood to slap on a big smile the moment someone points a camera at us. Nobody did anything to actually make us smile. They just told us to. That is why so many headshots look terrible.

A professional headshot should feel like you and the person viewing it are sitting across a table having a conversation. That is not your job to manufacture alone. That is the photographer’s job. My job is to coach you, guide you, and get genuine reactions out of you. When that happens, the image connects. People start to feel like they are forming a relationship with you before they have ever met you in real life.

Photographers have specialties just like any other field. If you have heart issues you do not just go to your general practitioner, you go to a cardiologist. If you need LASIK you go to a specialist, not your regular eye doctor.

Same holds true here. You would not want me, a headshot photographer, to shoot your wedding. I would get decent images, but I am not going to do as good a job as someone trained specifically in wedding photography. The reverse is equally true. A wedding photographer is not going to do as good a job with professional headshots as someone who has made it their entire focus.

There is a common misconception that headshots are easy because it is just head and shoulders. Headshots are genuinely hard to do well. I trained for it. I studied under Peter Hurley, one of the world’s most recognized headshot photographers. I was the first associate in this region of his training program, the Headshot Crew, and the first and only mentor in this region. I train other photographers how to do this work.

What often happens when business slows down for generalist photographers is they add headshot minis as a quick revenue source. You might save a little money upfront. But if that image is not working for you, how much are you losing in opportunity cost?

A headshot is a portrait from the shoulders up. That is the definition. What a lot of people are calling headshots are actually waist-up portraits, and that is a different thing entirely.

The other common mistake that comes with a waist-up crop: crossed arms. People cross their arms because they do not know what to do with their hands. Do not do this. It is cliche, and more importantly it is bad body language. Crossed arms tell the viewer you are trying to keep distance from them. Think about a bouncer at a bar. That posture says stay away. That is the opposite of the connection a headshot is supposed to create.

Think about how your headshot is actually going to be used. On LinkedIn, you get a small circle. People are scrolling on their phones. A waist-up shot shrinks your face down to almost nothing. Use that space wisely. Crop from the shoulders up and let your face do the work.

Every detail in a headshot communicates something. Before your session, make sure your clothes actually fit. A collar gap from a shirt that is too big looks sloppy. A collar that is too tight creates the opposite problem. Hair randomly falling across a shoulder looks like nobody was paying attention.

I recently saw a billboard in Louisville where the person’s hair was just everywhere. It made the whole image look cheap. And here is the thing: if someone is not going to pay attention to those details in the image they use to represent themselves professionally, what does that say about how they will handle the details in their actual work?

In my studio we work with the camera tethered to a computer so we can see everything in real time. Nothing gets missed before you leave.

This one will not apply to everyone, but it applies to more people than you might think.

I recently saw significant backlash on LinkedIn when two people posted headshots and admitted they were AI generated. The comment sections were full of people pointing out the obvious problem: you are trying to present your genuine self, but what you are putting out there is not actually you.

Multiple people in hiring positions commented directly that if they know it is an AI image, they will not hire that person. That is not a fringe opinion. A survey of recruiters found that 66% said discovering a candidate was using an AI headshot made them less likely to move forward.

Your headshot is supposed to help people connect with you. When they find out that image is not you, that it is what a computer thought you might look like, you have already started the relationship with a small deception. That is not a good foundation.

As I said at the top: your headshot is not just a picture. It has a job to do. Make sure it is doing that job.

If you are in Louisville or the surrounding areas and need to update your headshot, book a session below.