How to photograph a colleague for their headshot
Someone has handed you their phone and asked you to take their work photo. Here is the ten-minute version, including the part most people get wrong: what to say.
Somebody at work needs a new profile photo and you have been volunteered. You are not a photographer, you have their phone in your hand, and they are already looking uncomfortable.
This takes about ten minutes and most of it is not about the camera.
Before you lift the phone
Find a window. Stand them facing it, on an overcast day or in shade. That is the lighting done. A large soft source in front of them wraps around the face and puts a catchlight in the eyes.
Avoid three things: overhead office lights, which dig out the eye sockets; direct sun, which is a small hard source and produces black shadows; and a mix of window and lamp, which gives you two different colours on two halves of their face.
Move them away from the wall. Two or three metres if you can. It softens the background and stops light bouncing back onto their hair.
Check what is behind their head. A plant growing out of someone’s skull is the oldest mistake in portraiture. Move them, not the plant.
The camera part
Use the rear camera, not the selfie one.
Stand about two metres away and use the 2x or 3x lens. If the phone has no telephoto, shoot from two metres and crop afterwards. Do not solve framing by walking closer, because close is what enlarges the nose and flattens the rest of the face.
Hold the phone at their eye height, not yours. If they are shorter than you, crouch. This matters more than almost anything else you will do, and it is the thing tall people get wrong constantly.
Tap their eye on the screen to set focus there. Then check the first shot at full zoom: if the eyes are not sharp, nothing else matters.
Leave space around them. Crop later. A cropped crown cannot be recovered.
The part everyone gets wrong
Now the actual skill, which is not technical at all.
Do not say “smile”. It produces the worst expression a human face can make. The person immediately arranges their features and holds them, and holding is what makes a smile look fake, because the muscles around the eyes give up before the mouth does.
Talk to them instead. Ask what they are working on. Ask about their weekend. Ask anything that requires a real answer. Then take photos while they are talking and, more importantly, in the second just after they finish, which is when the face settles into something relaxed and alert.
Tell them what is going well. Not flattery, information. “That one is great, do that again.” People relax enormously when they know it is working, and they tense up in silence because silence reads as a problem.
Give them something to do with their body. Standing still in front of a camera is unnatural. Ask them to turn their shoulders about thirty degrees away and bring their face back to you. Ask them to shift their weight. Ask them to look away and back on three.
Take far more than you think. Thirty to fifty frames. Shoot in bursts. The hit rate for a genuinely good frame is low for everyone, including professionals, and the only fix is volume.
Two small corrections that do a lot
The chin. Almost everyone pulls their chin back when concentrating, which does nobody any favours. Ask them to push their chin slightly forward and then a fraction down. It feels ridiculous to do and photographs well. Demonstrate it yourself so they do not feel singled out.
The shoulders. Square-on to camera reads as confrontational and makes people look wider. Thirty degrees off, face back to the lens.
Finishing
Show them two or three frames before they leave, not the whole roll. Nobody enjoys scrolling forty photos of their own face, and it invites them to find fault.
Send them the originals, not screenshots and not a messaging-app copy. Both re-compress the file, and that loss is baked in permanently. Use a file-sharing link or email the actual image.
Then tell them the background and the lighting can still be improved, because the thing people usually dislike about their photo is the room it was taken in rather than themselves.
If you are doing a whole team
Consistency matters more than perfection. A set of photos that match reads as professional even if no individual frame is exceptional. A set where everyone was shot in a different corridor looks careless however good the best one is.
So: same window, same distance, same phone, same time of day if you can. Mark the floor where people stand. Do them all in one session.
Then run every photo through the same processing with the same settings, so the backgrounds, lighting and crops match across the team. The generator here does that with a fixed background and framing, in about four seconds per person, entirely in the browser, which also means nobody’s photo gets uploaded anywhere.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best phone camera setting for a headshot?
Rear camera, 2x or 3x lens, tap to focus on the eye. Portrait mode is optional and sometimes cuts hair badly, so take one of each if you use it.
How far away should I stand?
About two metres, then zoom or crop to fill the frame. Standing closer is the most common cause of photos that do not look like the person.
How do I get a natural smile out of someone?
Talk to them and shoot while they answer, especially in the moment just after. Never ask them to hold a smile through a countdown.
How many photos should I take?
Thirty to fifty. Shoot in bursts, change something small between bursts, and expect only a couple to be keepers.
What if the office has no good window?
Find any large soft source: a bright corridor, a lobby, a doorway, outside in shade. Failing that, take them outside on an overcast day. Almost anything beats overhead office lighting.