by Tim Gander

If You Want To Get Ahead, Get A Headshot

We all know how important it is to have a professionally-taken business portrait, so how come mine is so old?!

Yes, it’s time for the cobbler to mend his shoes and for the physician to heal himself. The photographer needs to take his own portrait. I’ve been putting it off because like most of you, I don’t like having my photo taken.

But that’s no excuse. Time has pretty much the same effect on everyone – it ages us, and I have no immunity against the ravages of time.

For a start, I have fewer grey hairs now; that is to say, I have fewer hairs. Apart from that, it’s just good practice to update your profile photo every three years (five at a stretch).

The issue is that while a simple selfie is easy enough to do, taking a selfie that looks like a professional portrait is a bit of a circus act. Modern cameras make it easier than it used to be, especially now that the camera can be operated via a phone app, but it’s still quite a feat of organisation and coordination. Maybe I should hire a photographer?

That would be fine by me, except I also take the opportunity of using myself as a model to really work on new ways of setting up, new approaches to getting the correct angle and perhaps more particularly, finding interesting tweaks to my current style. So making my new portrait will also be a chance to adjust and refine my portrait style.

In all likelihood the development will be more incremental than revolutionary, but it’s still a good exercise to go through.

And what could possibly go wrong? Artists and photographers have been making self portraits since the dawn of time. Vincent van Gogh famously did a few, and he turned out fine *googles the life of van Gogh and… “OH MY GOD! WHAT THE ACTUAL…?!!* Ok, maybe I’ll delay making my self portrait for a while longer…

Except there is always an excuse, from “I need to get my hair done” to “I’ve cut off my ear and presented it as a gift to my favourite prostitute”; I’ve heard them all and I can no longer wriggle out of it myself.

Now that I’ve said it, I need to go and do it. And I want you to nag me if I haven’t updated my profile photo in a week’s time. For the record, here’s my current one. Gosh, I looked so young!

Screen shot from the timgander.co.uk About page.
The last time I looked this young was about 10 years ago.

And if you’re now realising it’s been six years (or more!) since your business profile portrait was updated for your website or LinkedIn profile, drop me a line and we’ll organise a nice relaxed photo session. No excuses, let’s do it.

in Business Portraits 0 comments
 by Tim Gander

Photo case study: Location portrait.

I’ve written before on the subject of Photoshop, the pitfalls, dangers and terrors, but “meh”, nobody listened so I thought I’d show a recent example of where I have used some photo manipulation to benefit the final photo.

You see when I shoot for corporate clients, I prefer to get things pretty much spot-on in the camera, rather than taking any old muzzy smudge and hoping I can sort it all out later on the ‘puter. I have heard tales of “professional” photographers who work this way, and it tends to end in tears and a lot of wasted CEO/staff time, not to mention the wasted marketing budget, because by the time somebody has spotted that the Emperor’s new clothes are in fact a figment of the imagination, the cheeky little monkey with the winning smile and the expensive looking camera has caught the next plane to Rio with the company cheque already safely banked.

I digress; back to Photoshop, or to use the verb form, “photoshopping”. Not to be confused with the act of shopping for photos.

In the case where I was asked to get a website cover shot for Clucas Communications the brief was to get a double portrait of Peter and Sibylle Clucas against a white background so the designer could either leave the subjects against white or undertake a cutout more easily. In the event the final shot is used as a cutout against a white page, which works well.

That would seem easy enough, except that the shooting conditions were tricky (to get enough space we ended up setting up the shot outdoors with portable background and lights), so these were not perfect studio conditions. My one compromise then was that I knew I could get the background white-ish, but it wouldn’t be fully white as if we were in the studio with perfect lighting.

Below are the results, and the sharp-eyed among (amongst? amo amas amat?) you will notice that pretty much all I’ve done is go at the background with the dodge tool to lighten the highlights (only affecting those areas which are already almost white) to achieve a perfect whiteness any soap manufacturer would be proud of.

 

before and after photoshop examples of corporate portraits

Spot the difference. Can't see it? Oh well...

And despite the fact that most weeks I’ll have to listen to some smart Alec or Alice telling me what I can fix in Photoshop, I still stick to the principle that for my work, Photoshop is great for removing the dust spots that are the curse of the digital SLR and correcting the odd colour cast and generally preparing an image so that it is technically viable for either print or web. I’m not going to make a rainy day sunny, or drop the Taj Mahal into the background to make the view from your office window look more interesting. If that’s what you’re after, you’ll be wanting a different breed of photographer. One that will probably be in Brazil by the time you realise those “interesting” photos are in fact junk.

in Case Studies 9 comments