Everything we have published on Substack

The Headshot Brief: longer essays, one a day.

Substack (23)

• Diagnose before you reshoot
• Everything that changes when the destination is a professional network
• Forty matching portraits is a different problem from forty good ones
• Four briefs where the corporate advice is actively wrong
• Four fields where the conventions run backwards
• Four words to search for before uploading your face
• Giving a portrait, and the one way it goes wrong
• Measure first, then decide whether to spend anything
• Medicine and law want opposite photographs
• One photograph, five destinations
• Should you smile, and other questions with thinner evidence than you expect
• The background decides more of it than your face does
• The briefs that ask for warmth, and why that is the hardest instruction
• The checklist that comes before any quote
• The objections, and why most of them are correct
• The photo is the last thing anyone fixes and the first thing everyone sees
• The photoshoot that is not a photoshoot
• Three companies, and the bottleneck was never the photography
• What a corporate portrait is actually a photograph of
• What people try first, and why it does not work
• What "studio quality" actually describes
• When your work is visual, the portrait is a sample of it
• Why companies buy this, in the order the reasons actually decide it

A single index covering every platform is at the BetterPic index. The portrait pages themselves are on BetterPic.