LinkedIn headshots and other work portraits

The face has to be the subject

A work portrait is a small meeting that happens before the real one. Someone opens a profile, a proposal, or a conference page, and your face is there for a moment with your name. The photograph’s job is to be you, in even light, with a collar that belongs to your coloring and a background that stays behind you. A better headshot agrees more closely with the person who walks into the room. It does not raise your worth, and it does not manufacture competence.

Viewers do form fast impressions from faces. Willis and Todorov, in Psychological Science in 2006, showed how quickly those impressions arrive. Todorov and colleagues, in Science in 2005, studied judgments of competence from still portraits. People can agree with each other about those judgments. Agreement is not accuracy. A tidy file does not make you competent, and a cluttered one does not make you incompetent. Changing your jaw to look more “professional” would counterfeit a trait the research does not justify. Make the picture fair and legible. Leave character to the work.

That fairness is practical. Eyes in focus. Both shoulders in the frame. A background quieter than your face. A collar you would wear to the meeting the portrait is standing in for. If a stranger can describe the wall before they can describe you, the portrait has hired the wall.

Even light, from somewhere in front of you

Even light means the two sides of the face are close, and the sockets of the eyes are not black ponds. A window in front of you, or a little to one side with a white wall filling the shadow, does this without a kit. A ceiling panel directly overhead carves a shadow under the brow and the nose and then people say you look tired. You are not tired in a way the portrait is allowed to invent. Move until the window is the main light. If the shadow side goes too dark, turn a white board, a sheet, or the plain wall toward that cheek.

A ring light can be even and can also stamp a ring into the eyes. If you use one, keep it gentle and keep the room behind you plain. Two mismatched lamps, one warm and one blue, paint the face in two temperatures and make the collar impossible to judge. Pick one light and let it dominate. If the file comes out blue, you were under a cool lamp or the phone guessed wrong. Retake beside the window rather than dragging the skin toward orange with a slider.

Richard Russell’s 2009 paper in Perception describes facial contrast, the lightness gap between features and the surrounding skin, and how that gap changes the way a face is read. It is not a license to rank faces. It is a reason to protect the gap you already have. A headshot that blows the skin out to white, or that loses the eyes in shadow, changes the gap in the file. Expose for the face. Let the background go a little darker if it must. The cheeks are the subject, not the lamp.

Eyes sharp, shoulders inside the frame

Focus on the eye nearer the camera. Ears can be soft. A portrait mode that locks onto the nose, or onto a bright earring, gives you a sharp nose and a vague gaze. Tap the eye on the screen before you shoot, or have the photographer do the equivalent. If you wear glasses, watch for a white reflection over the pupil. Raise the light, or tip your chin a fraction, until the reflection slides off the lens. Glare that hides the eye fails the picture even when the collar is right.

Include both shoulders, with a little space above the head, and crop somewhere around the mid-chest. A face cropped at the forehead looks like a document photo taken too close. A full-body frame makes the face too small to read at profile size. Many sites display the file in a circle. Keep your face near the center so the circle does not slice an eye or leave you looking over your own shoulder. The lanyard from a conference, the badge with a company you have left, and the tiny face in the back row of a panel are not headshots. They are souvenirs of a day.

If you are seated, sit tall enough that the shoulders stay in the same story as the hips, and do not let the chair back push you into a curl. The portrait can end at the chest and still show a slumped shoulder. A standing frame is often easier: feet quiet, shoulders down, the camera at eye level. A camera below the chest invents a heavier jaw. A camera above your head, aimed down, shrinks the jaw and shows the ceiling. Eye level is the setting.

A collar from this season of your clothes

The collar is part of the impression because it sits against the jaw, where the eye lands after the eyes. Choose a color that keeps your skin looking even in the same window you are using to shoot. A navy suit is not a universal professional color. Navy is a color. If it grays your skin, pick another collar in a similar formality: a stone, a soft white, a deep green, a warm brown, whatever your coloring can carry. The meeting can still be serious. Serious is the occasion. The collar is the frame around the face.

Match the formality to the work you actually do. A founder in a studio and a counsel in court do not owe each other the same jacket. They both owe the camera a collar that is in season, pressed enough to lie flat, and free of a distracting print at the jaw. Blur your eyes at the file. If the shirt becomes a louder pattern than the face, the pattern is the portrait. Wear the pattern under a jacket, or save it for a day with no camera. White that has yellowed, and black that is darker than your hair and your brows, both steal attention. You can still own them. You do not have to give them the jaw on the day of the headshot.

Season matters in the plain sense of the calendar, too. A heavy wool rolled at the neck in a humid month, or a linen shirt crushed into a shape you will not wear to the interview, dates the file badly. Wear the weight you wear to work this month. Update the portrait when your hair, your glasses, or the formality of your job has clearly changed. A five-year-old file of a person with a different haircut is a dating-profile problem wearing a suit.

A busy background makes you its guest

Books you have not read, a neon sign, a mural, a pile of dishes, a virtual skyline, a logo wall: each of them competes. The eye goes to the brightest or busiest thing. If that thing is behind you, you become the background’s guest. Stand in front of a plain wall, a quiet curtain, or a soft plant that is out of focus and not growing out of your ear. Step a little away from the wall so a shadow does not trace your head like a cutout.

A real office can work when it is actually yours and visually quiet. A window with a calm view, a single plant, a desk that is not a collage. If the office is loud, move to the hallway. Hallways are underrated. A flat paint color and a door out of frame have rescued more portraits than a booked set. Outdoors, use open shade, the side of a building, not full sun in the eyes and not a busy street market behind your head. The market is a good dating activity. It is a bad coworker.

Virtual backgrounds cut hair into a halo and fail on glasses. If the tool offers one, decline it. A plain wall you can touch is better than a beach you cannot. If a photographer supplies a mottled gray backdrop, look at a test frame and ask whether the gray is quieter than your face. Some backdrops are so contrasty they become a print. You are allowed to ask for the plain one.

The hour you book, and the file you accept

Schedule the picture for a time of day when you look like yourself, not after a night you would not want repeated. Morning window light is often the even kind. If your face is puffy on waking, wait an hour and eat something ordinary. Do not buy a new jacket on the way. Wear the one you have already sat in, so the shoulders are settled. Bring a second collar in a nearby color in case the first one shouts in the file. Change one thing at a time. If you change jacket, glasses, and hair between frames, you will not know which frame is better.

When the files arrive, judge them on a laptop in daylight, enhance off. Look for the sharp eye, the even cheek, the collar that does not outrank the face, and the background that stays back. Reject plastic skin. Reject a jaw that is not yours. Reject a crop that cuts a shoulder in a way that looks like a mistake rather than a choice. You need one file for the circle and one slightly wider file for places that show more of the torso. Ask for that wider frame at the shoot so you are not stuck with a crop you cannot undo.

Then put the file where the work lives and stop reshooting it every week. A headshot is done when a colleague who sees you on ordinary days would recognize the circle. If they would not, fix the light or the year of the picture. Do not fix it by becoming a different shape. The impression will be fast, as Willis and Todorov described. Let it be fast about you.