Do Glasses Make You Look Smarter in Your Headshot?
Do glasses make you look smarter? They can. Glasses tend to make you look smarter; depending on the frames, they can also make you look a bit less attractive. In 2011, Helmut Leder, Michael Forster and Gernot Gerger at the University of Vienna ran four experiments on how glasses change the way faces are perceived, […]
A Tenth of a Second Picked Your Senator by looking at their image. Your headshot is doing the same.
In the run-up to the 2006 midterms, Princeton psychologist Alexander Todorov showed people pairs of faces for a tenth of a second and asked one question: which person looks more competent? The faces belonged to real candidates for governor and the U.S. Senate, and participants’ answers were thrown out for any race where they recognized […]
What Boston Professionals Should Wear for a Headshot
What is the right thing to wear for headshots, which fabrics and colors fail on camera, and why you should bring more options than you think you need. Bring more than you think you need. There’s really no time limit on a session at my studio and no cap on wardrobe changes, so the only […]
Fair or Not: Corporate Headshots and First Impressions in Boston
When someone lands on your company’s team page, they’ve already formed a snap judgment about whether your firm is trustworthy and competent, sometimes in well under a second, before they’ve read a single line of your bio. For services businesses across Boston, where the people are the product, that makes consistent, professional corporate headshots in […]
The $39 AI Headshot That Could Cost You a Job in Boston
Thirty-nine dollars for a headshot that beats your phone’s selfie camera is a genuinely good deal. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, and if you’re a job seeker in the Boston market with zero budget for a professional headshot photographer, an AI generator is a reasonable stopgap. That’s the honest answer, even coming from someone […]
New Hire Headshots in Boston: Matching Your Team’s Shoot
A company headshot day happens once or twice a year. New hires don’t stop coming just because the shoot is over, and every one of them needs a headshot that matches the rest of the team. It’s the most common maintenance problem I see with corporate headshots in Boston: the original shoot looked sharp, and […]
Hey Boston! Is Your LinkedIn Photo Engaging or Meh?
An engaging LinkedIn headshot does three things at once: it looks like you on a genuinely good day, it reads as competent, confident and approachable within the first fraction of a second someone sees it, and it’s consistent with how you show up in person. A “meh” photo does none of those, and the data […]
AI Can Write Your Post. It Can’t Give You a Good Headshot.
I’m not against AI. I use it. If I need to clean up glasses glare or swap a background, it does in ten minutes what used to take me an hour of manual masking. As a tool, in the right hands, it’s genuinely good. What it doesn’t do is replace you. Not your writing voice, […]
Realtor Headshots in Boston: What Actually Works!
I sold real estate in Boston before I ever picked up a camera for a living, so I’ve seen the agent headshot problem from both sides: the awkward yard sign photo, and the client meeting where the person who walks in doesn’t quite match the photo they saw online first. I remember when I was […]
Behind the Gear: Why This Boston Photographer Uses One Lighting Setup for Headshots
Every headshot photographer’s website says the same thing: professional lighting. This statement is not only subjective, but in many cases meaningless. Professional could mean four studio strobes and diffusion panels the size of a garage door, or it could mean one large soft box angled right. In my studio, and on every on-location job I […]