After sharing our first big VACCINATED trip in 14 months out to see our immediate families out West in Arizona & California, we’re back to the regularly scheduled program-! This week we’re sharing with you Professional Career Portraits (Headshots) that we’ve captured over the past decade-!
Our Professional Photography specialty is Wedding Photography & Engagement Sessions, though we also often capture Career Portraits, Family Portrait Sessions, Couple Portraits, Senior Photos, Newborn Sessions, & Pet Portraits every year-! For about a year from March 2020 through Spring 2021 it both wasn’t legal AND we didn’t feel moral/ ethical capturing tiny Newborns or even high school Seniors within our studio during the Covid-19 Pandemic for Newborn Sessions & Senior Photos due to the inability of social distancing and clients not able to wear masks, so we refrained from those two types of photos during the uncertain and unvaccinated times. Those areas are normally other photographers’ Specialties anyway (like how we specialize in Wedding Photography & Engagement Sessions), so we weren’t too upset, but we genuinely missed capturing Career Professional Portraits in our studio. Others legally DID still capture Career Professional Headshots “On Location” i.e. outside in curated locations in 2020 instead (so folks weren’t Pandemic Unsafe by having folks unmasked in studios), but we’re excited to get back into our Studio hopefully in late summer since we’re fully vaccinated-!
Reasons You May Need Professional Career Headshots
One of our favorite things to capture outside of weddings & Engagements is definitely Professional Career Portraits-! It’s nice to be one-on-one with a person (a human adult specifically) and get to direct them & professionally light them with all of our studio lights in such a way that they walk away claiming that it’s the best portrait that’s ever been taken of them (at least since their Senior Photos back in high school)! Professional Career Portraits in this day-and-age are now also more important than ever. Everything is digital & transparent (with businesses often showing WHO works for the company so that you can get to know them), so great photographs are highly sought after. Folks see a photo of your face listed on your LinkedIn page, your company’s Website, Facebook page, Twitter page, Instagram, TikTok business page, and more, but often in this quick-paced world you don’t have much more than a cell phone selfie of yourself or a snapshot from a phone for an up-to-date portrait. We also often have clients whose boss has requested a professional photo for their ID tag at the hospital, for the business website, or more, so many times by capturing these Portraits we’re fulfilling a required portion of their job! Other times folks are looking for a new job or are newly graduated from university, their MBA, law school, medical school, or their PhD and want to spruce up their LinkedIn page and more, so they want to outwardly show them looking their best and we’re happy to do that for them.
Anywho, let’s get on with it and show you some Professional Career Portraits that we’ve captured for our clients over the past decade!
We’ve captured most of these Portraits in our studio or On Location around Indiana, California, Michigan, and Ohio! We have the ability to capture folks in our Studio here in South Bend, Indiana, move our Studio sets to YOU, or capture the images On Location either indoors at universities, work places, other indoor venues, or in the great Outdoors in spots that we’ve specifically curated to fit your career/ intended mood of the images.
We especially love using different colored backdrops & colored gels that we have in our studio (with darker colors being our favorite) for some diversity in the background of classic studio images, but some businesses do require that we use a pure white backdrop!
It’s crazy to think that we’ve been capturing Professional Career Portraits for over a decade-! Folks don’t realize how much goes in to our career and getting better every year, but we can definitely tell the difference between earlier Portraits and those we’ve taken in more recent years.
Sometimes if the career fits, we get to tweak the lighting in our studio to make it more dramatic, but it’s a rarity! We cherish both the more dramatic and artistic Portraits that we get to capture as well as the standard brighter images that we get to capture for clients, though.
One wonderful thing about being one-on-one with folks is that we usually get to chat with them a bit about their job and their passions. This is definitely not the case on most wedding days, during hectic Family Portrait Sessions, during Newborn Sessions, or during Pet Portraits-!
As you can definitely tell from these above and below, the studio with standard high end lighting definitely has a different feel than outdoor On Location portraits. When On Location (especially outside) we can have the scene also illicit some more emotion into the photo as well! This is especially helpful for professional Therapists, Psychologists, artists, Nursing Home workers/ owners, actresses, and those who want to add in a bit more warmth to the scene.
We also always ask that folks allow us to capture some Portraits of them smiling as well as not smiling (being more stoic). This helps add more diversity in the images as does bringing another top, layers to put over your top, and maybe different jewelry or pairs of glasses to sort of change it up so that you can choose your favorite image or few images!
Different types of cameras & lenses also play in to how your images will look. Below are 3 images all taken on different types of cameras which are ALL very, very high end and professional, but have different levels of sharpness and image quality. Most of the time you can also alter how a face looks via the lens that’s chosen for each particular Portrait. Last night we used 3 lenses for Career Portraits for a client and you can definitely tell the difference it made on her face. Often Portrait Photographers love to use an 85 mm lens, though everyone has different preferences for that kind of Portrait they’re capturing and what the environment is (and what they’re trying to achieve with the background of the image- very compressed or less compressed).
Lastly, sometimes it’s nice for us to incorporate someone’s career directly into the image! Below are 2 men that we captured: One man works on a ranch taking paying patrons for horseback rides across the desert and one man who is a blacksmith and often is paid to demonstrate the old way of blacksmithing-!
Thanks so much for checking out out some of our favorite Career Portraits (Professional Headshots) from the past decade of our career! We truly enjoy capturing these very much and hope that it’s opened your eyes to the potential of a great Professional Portrait! It definitely jogged our memories seeing just some of these portraits that we’ve captured over the past 10 years, so thank you for indulging us in this trip down memory lane as prep to capture new Career Portraits later in 2021! (We are definitely thankful that we’re able to have an indoor studio to capture clients in on rainy days that may come up in late summer 2021 or fall/ winter 2021 since studios are often crucial for Career Portraits in the winter (and we could NOT use our studio during the past year of Pandemic or the 3rd Wave of Covid over the ‘20 to ‘21 winter)! Most folks don’t want soaking wet hair for their nice Career Portraits, so studios are great for non-Pandemic winters). Anyway, we’ll catch you next Weekly Wednesday!