Free guide
The Professional’s Guide to
Personal Brand Photography
Everything you need to plan a headshot or brand session, including a shot list and session-day checklist, from a photographer who has been on both sides of the camera.
What’s inside
- 1Why your photo matters
- 2Headshot vs brand session
- 3What to wear
- 4Studio vs on location
- 55 things that make a great headshot
- 6Making it work on LinkedIn
- 7Your brand session shot list
- 8Session-day checklist
- 9Booking to gallery
- 10Investment
Part one
The honest truth
Your photo is working
for you or against you.
Your headshot is the first thing people see. It comes before your title, your bio, or a single word you’ve written. It follows you into every Zoom call, proposal and introduction.
1/10 sec
That’s how long it takes people to decide whether a face looks trustworthy. In the research, giving them more time didn’t change their judgment. It only made them more confident in it.
Source: Willis & Todorov, Princeton, Psychological Science (2006)
Up to 21×
more profile views for LinkedIn members who have a photo.
Source: LinkedIn data, reported 2017
What a great professional photo says before you do
- Competence: you take your work seriously.
- Approachability: someone people want to work with.
- Trust: credible before a word is read.
- Recognition: people know you when they meet you.
People decide whether they trust you before they read your name. Your photo is the one part of that first impression you get to control.
That was part one
Get the planning kit,
free.
The full guide, plus the tools to plan your session:
- A brand session shot list, organized by where every image will be used
- A session-day checklist for the week before, the night before and the day of
- What to wear, studio vs location, LinkedIn, and exactly what a session costs
It opens right here the moment you enter your email.