Why I frame your Headshots the way I do.

A lot of clients ask why we frame and shoot the way we do. Many come from the old days where headshots were shot in portrait orientation and don’t quite get why we now do it in landscape orientation… let me explain.

Most Headshots back in the day were shot in Portrait orientation as they would be printed for casting agents and used as physical assets delivered from a preproduction house. That orientation was seen as the best way to ensure agents saw them and that they worked for their clients.

Nowadays, most Headshots live online through profiles, portals and social media, which are no longer limited to portrait orientation and which gives us a lot more freedom to use negative space and creative framing to emphasise certain aspects of the image and the client.

I shoot predominantly landscape orientation because the web is designed that way. When you browse the net, 99% of all the content is presented in a landscape format and thus we shoot for that as that’s where 99% of all the image we take end up.

The beauty of shooting like this is it gives us the freedom to create many different styles, formats and crops from a single image, let me show you:

Here are 7 different crops from one single image for various uses and platforms.

As you can see, the options are endless by adding just that little extra space to the image by using landscape orientation. The joy of shooting with incredibly large resolution images means we can drop down to 25% without losing any real-world quality of the images. This gives you soooo many options!

Here is another one from a recent shoot:

I hope that gives a slightly better idea of why we do it. Here are the resulting crops from a recent shoot to give you an idea of just how many options this creates:

It’s really easy to create these crops yourself in your phone or another editing app. Here is a quick video on how I do an Instagram and Facebook crop on my phone (keep in mind you’ll need to use the full-size image to retain as much quality as possible).

No go out there and do your own amazing crops and styles with you headshots!

Any questions, please let me know!

Ciao.

B.