What's the difference between using a simple photo taken by a friend and a modern, high-quality headshot taken by a pro photographer when it comes to your LinkedIn profile or your acting career? Does it really make that big of a difference, and if so, why?

​Headshots do more for you that just put a face to your name. Using professional headshots on your social media and LinkedIn profiles creates a great first impression and builds trust between you and people looking at your profile. If you're an organization, matching headshots for everybody on your team unifies your website and company brand, making it come across as more professional and aesthetically pleasing.

Here is what having a professional headshot can subconsciously say about you:

1. I am established and have reached a level in my career where I both need and can afford a professional headshot.
2. I take my career and professional presence seriously.
3. I have a well-established personal brand and people trust me.
4. I am in-demand - people are requesting a professional photo of me.
5. I am detail-oriented and make sure important things are done properly.
   
6. I stay up to date with modern trends.
7. I'm the type of person who goes above and beyond most others.

Each of these is important to being perceived positively, whether you're looking for a new job or searching for opportunities to advance your career (or you're a company looking to wow your clients).

​Having a nice camera and snapping a photo doesn't equate to a great photo. No matter the style of photo you're looking for, be it a landscape, wedding photo, or portrait, each requires a certain eye and unique set of skills. Trained headshot photographers are imperative for great headshots because they know how to capture specific expressions and how to direct you for great posture, no double chin, and finding your best side.

Photographers in department stores or the "trained portrait photographers" you can find online for $50 almost never understand how to direct those subtle things that are so important. And if they say they specialize in portraiture, you should always make sure the people in their portfolio have fantastic expressions. Have you ever looked at a photo and thought to yourself, "There's something slightly off with this person?" They look worried or "out to lunch"? That's exactly what you want to avoid in your headshot.

If your expression doesn't look natural or the lighting is off in your shot, thousands of people will see it every month and each will be thinking, "There's something slightly off here."

Is that the first impression you want to make?
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Many people are surprised when they come in for a shoot by the amount of direction we give. From body position to the subtle squint of your eyes, to how far your chin is tilted down, we leave no stone unturned. Each of these details really matters.

​I understand that hiring a professional headshot photographer can be expensive. If it's going to completely break your bank and you're giving up your savings to do it, STOP. I don't want you to spend all your money on a headshot if you truthfully can't afford it.

We're beginning to shoot a brand new mini series and we're inviting YOU to be in it!

I'm super excited for this. Each week (or every other week, depending on how busy we are), I will personally be doing a photoshoot with a client who wants to be featured in the show.

The goal of the show is not only to capture great images for people who normally don't like photos of themselves, but to also use what we've learned during the shoot to help other people who watch the show learn tips to look better on-camera.

I hope it's a win-win for everyone!

​If you're interested in being a part of this and working with me personally, I'd love for you to sign up!

Wow. I can't believe that ten years ago today, this company officially started.

​I'm currently sitting here at our downtown studio getting ready to go to an awesome celebratory dinner with my team at FLAME, a great hibachi grill in midtown. But as I was getting ready, I decided it would make sense to capture this moment by writing a blog post so I could look back and see where I've been, what I've done, and where I hope to go.

10 years ago, I remember picking up my camera and getting ready to do my first real headshot session. Instead of just doing some photos for friends of mine like I usually did, I was going to meet an actual client!

My hands were shaking, making it difficult to hold my camera without dropping it...

But wait a minute, how did I get here? Let's go back a bit further in time.

​What first got me interested in shooting headshots? Well, it's actually a funny story that started back when I was just nine years old.

When I was nine, my dad got my sister and me a Nintendo 64. I remember it like it was yesterday... the infamous GoldenEye 007 James Bond first-person shooter game.

I was obsessed.

Every single day I'd come home from school and play that game for hours, both single-player mission mode and multiplayer games with my friends and sister.

After a few months of playing, I decided I wanted to watch the movie GoldenEye - I had never seen it before.

Well, I loved the movie just as much as the game and it quickly turned into a marathon 2 weeks of watching every single James Bond movie ever made.

After watching all the James Bond movies I possibly could, listening to all the music, and playing the game as much as I could, I remember one day asking if I could borrow my dad's video camera so I could record myself and my friend doing James Bond missions.

Over the summer of 1998, we ran throughout our South Jersey neighborhood with toy guns (probably scaring the neighbors). We set up booby traps in the woods with trip wires that would cause small branches to fall down on us if we didn't step over them properly, and we'd sneak around our house to do these fake missions, all while setting my dad's video camera to film us on a tripod.

After recording, I'd take the footage and connect it to my VCR, where I used some wires to connect the video game to the sound input of the VCR so that as we would shoot the guns in the video, I would push the "shoot" button on the Nintendo 64 controller and the gunshot sound would be recorded.

Those were crazy lo-fi times.

Well, about a year later in 1999 or 2000, my parents bought me a computer program to allow me to edit videos (very basic-level editing), but I had a ton of fun doing special effects and trying to figure out ways to composite explosions over our videos, and edit music into the scenes we created.

Fast forward another few years to 2003, and my family and I moved to Colorado for my dad's job. My parents bought me an iMac for Christmas with Final Cut Pro, my first professional video editing software. I was a high school freshman, 14 years old.

Fast forward two more years and I joined Warren Tech High School where I took their video production class during my junior year so I could learn how to do professional video work. I learned tons of things from my teacher Mr. White, and my video production quality was getting way better. I remember submitting to a video competition called Skills USA, and I won third place in my class, which enabled me to go on to compete in the state Skills USA contest. I took that contest much more seriously and won first place!

I then attended the national Skills USA contest in Kansas City, MS but unfortunately placed ninth. It was a huge learning experience and taught me that if I took video production seriously, I might be able to one day build a business out of it!

That summer, a good friend of mine asked how much I would charge to shoot his sister's wedding. I was so floored that they asked me, so I told him $400. His sister was astonished at the low rate and immediately jumped on it, and over that summer between junior and senior years of high school, I was referred to lots of people and starting shooting events almost every weekend for between $500 and $800. I remember being asked at one point if I knew how to shoot photography... My only experience was with video, but I said, "Sure!" Immediately I went out, spent $1,000 on a camera, and watched tutorials online of how to shoot properly. It paid off because I started getting even more referrals for photography and, all told, I think I made about $3,000 that summer!

I continued shooting events throughout my senior year of high school, and then I applied to NYU for filmmaking.

​I couldn't believe it, but they accepted me!

Fast forward to 2007, and my parents drove me to New York, set me up in a dorm, and suddenly I was in the middle of the world's greatest city, and I had a very limited sense of culture and had to figure out how to get along with tons of different people. Fortunately, some of my business experience from shooting weddings and events helped me there.

For my first few years, I focused solely on filmmaking, but as I made more friends (especially actors), I started to get asked to shoot headshots. All they knew was that I owned a good quality dSLR camera and they wanted me to do some nice photos for them. I didn't even know what a headshot was when I first started!

After doing a few shoots towards the end of 2008 for some friends of mine, I decided that I actually enjoyed shooting headshots. Someone told me that most photographers charged upwards of $600 to $800 for really quick shoots, and my immediate thought was: "I could charge half of that and be happy, and save clients lots of money!"

I immediately decided I wanted to build up a small portfolio. I didn't have a website for headshots yet, but I did have a website for my wedding videography and photography, so I put some of the photos I did for my friends on there, and I posted my first ad on Craigslist:

​Free Headshots - I am looking to build my portfolio and will give you free actor headshots!

I only got three responses, and one was from Jay Amari.

Which brings me back to where we left off from earlier:

My hands were shaking, making it difficult to hold my camera without dropping it as I walked through Washington Square Park, getting ready to meet him.

I was nervous because the only portrait lens I had was a $60 used 50mm f/1.8 manual focus lens. What if I couldn't keep him sharp in focus? What if he was mean? What if he hated the way the pictures looked?

Well, I couldn't have asked for a more friendly and awesome first client. Jay was great to work with and taught me some useful tricks he had learned over time for how to look good on-camera. It was he who inspired me to want to focus so strongly on expression, and why I later gave City Headshots the tagline: It's All About Expression.

Well, fast forward about a year and I had created my website and started furiously writing blog articles every day and posting backlinks to the site to get it to show up on the first page of Google. And what do you know? By the beginning of 2011, right as I was getting close to graduating, the website started showing up!

Immediately, I went from shooting about 5 people per month to shooting about 10 people per week!

It was a HUGE difference.

I started gaining tons of experience and taking my photography to a whole new level, and my clients started referring their friends.

Shortly after graduating, I moved to a small apartment on the Upper West Side. After moving there, I really started learning about marketing and figuring out how to bring in more clients, even though I was literally shooting people against a sheet hanging from a wall (and using work lights to light them)! I started getting reviews for my business on Yelp and Google, and from 2011 to 2012, I went from working with 10 clients per week to about 20 clients per week!

I then moved down to the financial district and got a small apartment on Wall Street. I upgraded my equipment and began working with interns to help me with editing photos and doing video editing work.

Over the next few years, I moved a few times, and in 2013 I opened up an official studio separate from where I lived. At that point, Samantha Rayward (our current head photographer) started working with me and assisting me on shoots.

Another year later I hired my first full-time person, a makeup artist, and then we moved to a larger studio. We started hiring more people, and eventually split our large studio into two smaller studios. In 2018 I personally stopped shooting so I could focus on growing the business and building systems to enable us to serve our clients even better than before (although I occasionally drop in for a shoot from time to time).

And now here we are, ten years later, 2019. We have two studios, over 250 reviews online, we're still showing up on the first page of Google, we have eight team members (3 photographers, 3 makeup artists, a marketing contractor, and myself), and we are getting ready to hire two more people (another makeup artist and a sales person) in the coming months.

All I can say is that I am extremely grateful for the way things have gone so far and I can't begin to describe how excited I am to see where the next ten years takes us.

One of the biggest questions we get is how to look more confident on camera. Some people worry that their eyes look too wide, others that their expression looks unnatural, and still others (especially people who look young) that they won’t project the confidence to enable people to take them seriously in their line of work.
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The goal with this article is to hopefully show you that no matter how uncomfortable you normally are on-camera normally, a few tricks can help you go from looking worried, anxious, and fearful to relaxed, happy, and confident!

There are two primary things to keep in mind regarding confidence:

1. The Mechanics: How the eyes, mouth, eyebrows, and chin work together to create a confident expression.
2. Your Mental Focus: How your thoughts allow (or disallow) you to look confident on-camera.

As a headshot photographer, I hear the same thing almost every day: "I'm going to be a really difficult subject because I'm not photogenic at all."

And then I'll say, "No, don't worry about that!"

And the response is almost always the same...

"No, but I'm REALLY not."

Fortunately my team and I have worked with enough people and learned enough about angles, expression, and lighting that we're able to work with almost anyone and help them find a photo of themselves that they'll love. I decided to compile this list of 5 reasons that prove you're actually more photogenic than you think you are in order to help people see themselves in a whole new light (no pun intended).

Did you know that depending on the type of light and angle, the shape and look of your face will change? For instance, if you take a photo and think your face looks too round, it might just be because you are used to looking at yourself straight on in a mirror with harsh light coming from above (like in a bathroom).

Did you know that this means you have a warped perspective of your own face? People around you actually see you in more situations, from more angles, and in more lighting conditions than you'll ever see yourself. Plus, you're used to looking at a mirror-image of yourself... everyone else sees you the way you actually look.

If you're having photos taken, be sure to have the photographer take your pictures from your favorite angle if you have one. The lighting should be customized in the most flattering way to highlight your eyes and create jawline shadows, slimming the face attractively. When shot on the correct angle with the right lighting, it's rare anyone will be unhappy with their photos unless it's due to a blemish or something temporary (that can be Photoshopped out).

​Just because you think you're unphotogenic doesn't necessarily mean others will. You shouldn't assume that your view is the right one because that's essentially saying everyone who thinks otherwise is wrong. Are all your friends and family wrong?

Most people believe they are the only ones who can correctly criticize their appearance because everyone else is "too nice." In fact, we tend to look at ourselves from a biased perspective that's been colored not only by the physical limitations of a bathroom mirror (as described above), but also by our past, our beliefs, and our values. For instance, if you grew up in a household where your parents constantly disparaged you, you're less likely to feel confident in your appearance (and vice versa). This is true regardless of how photogenic you really are.

Did you know that expressions of anger or sadness can actually make you appear less photogenic to others? If you feel angry or sad because you think you're not photogenic, the expression your face forms will actually cause you to look more unattractive... It's a self-fulfilling prophecy!

Have you ever noticed how some people have sharp lines between their eyebrows, giving them a permanent frown? That's because they frown often in real life and the lines have etched themselves into their face.

When we shoot headshots, fortunately we're able to fix some of these lines in Photoshop to soften the expression and help people appear more photogenic, but in real life, those lines are permanently etched. Your day to day expression and mood can actually lead to a more or less photogenic appearance over time, so be aware of your emotions and live a happy life!

​If you're worried that you have bad skin, chances are it's only temporary. Skin conditions can often be rectified by changing your diet to leafy greens, salads, and fish. Too many bread, sweets, and acidic foods increase your body's need to detoxify to survive, and what happens? Breakouts (detox areas) show up on the skin.

Did you know that having bad posture can cause people to think you're less photogenic? Posture can easily be fixed by doing a few key posture exercises, the best of which is to hang from a pull-up bar and pull your shoulders back and push your chest up to the sky, and hold that position for about 10 to 20 seconds. If you don't have access to a pull-up bar, stand up tall, looking straight ahead, and put your arms straight out at both sides. Slowly rotate your hands backwards as far as you can and hold that position for about 10 to 20 seconds. You'll feel yourself stand extremely tall with perfect posture. After a few weeks of daily exercises, your posture should be significantly better.

Most of the concerns addressed in this section (except posture), can be adjusted in Photoshop if you're having headshots taken, so feel free to mention them to your photographer. For posture, the photographer should point that out during the shoot and help you adjust it as needed.

As time goes by, we all get older and our faces change. Some of us are unlucky and suffer accidents or diseases that cause disfigurements.

However, none of these things should cause us to think we're less photogenic because so much of it is based on our personality. At the end of the day, it's not about what we look like; it's about how hard we work, how many people we help, and how much we strive to become better versions of ourselves.

There will always be people who see us negatively, just as there will always be people who see us positively, no matter what we look like. As long as we're friendly and helpful to others, they'll like and admire us.

​The goal whenever you're on camera is to capture a great expression and ensure you look just like yourself on your very best day. We promise to help you with that.