The Single Biggest Mistake Photographers Make

How 95% of “professional” photographers are making you look worse by posing you wrong, and what you can do to fix it!

This article is about posing you in your portrait or headshot for best results. The two photos below are actual corporate headshots by two different “professional” photographers. To my eye, they are murky and the skin tones are off. Both taken in professional portrait studios with professional cameras and lighting.

These are actual photos in use today that other photographers charged these executives to take of them, only to pose them ignorantly. Most “Professional” Photographers Will Make Your Neck Look Fat.

But they contain the needless flaw that I see every week in my line of work as a Dallas photographer for portraits and headshots — the neck looks fat and the jawline looks weak, like the chin is melting into the neck. This fail is surprisingly common! I say: friends don’t let friends suffer from poorly-posed headshots!

Most photographers have not actually been trained in posing their subjects. Most photographers as so focused on their camera and lighting gear that training on how to pose people PRECISELY takes a back seat. They can find online, many people reviewing various photo equipment, but not people training them to pose corporate people like fashion cover models! They don’t mean to be mean with your photos; they just literally don’t know better. As a result, you don’t look nearly as good as you could in your photos.

When a corporate client comes to me to take over as a better photographer for their firm (be it a hospital, law firm, financial services company or other client in a high-trust industry), the FIRST thing I do is go back and fix all the awful posing their employees have been afflicted with from those photographers that don’t know what they are doing when it comes to posing people, especially the chin/neck.

We’ve all seen women hold their phones up so high for “selfies”, overcompensating in fact, to avoid the fat neck look. But that angle of photo is not how we see them in real life and has the downside of appearing artificial. It feels like you’re always LOOKING DOWN ON THEM, which, while successfully minimizing the neck, makes the subject diminutive as a person. Don’t do this; you’re an adult, not a dwarf! Photo by Tim Robberts

Most people simply call this the problem of the “double chin” and that is close enough to the truth. Most women, when taking that “selfie” hold their phone’s camera up high and raise their chin — trying to compensate for precisely this issue. But they (not being professional trained in posing for photos) are either sloppy or over-compensating. But the issue is very real —no one wants a mushy, fat neck.

The RIGHT way to fix this is a face-forward pose at a SUPER SPECIFIC angle to the camera. That angle is unique to each individual. It is simple in concept, but too involved to try to explain in words. But the bottom line is that, yes, your headshots and portraits don’t have to show you with an obese neck and a melting chin.

As a Dallas headshot and portrait photographer, I am very precise and conscientious about the angle of your face and I pose carefully to avoid the pitfall of the melting chin effect — without resorting to a non-social angle of looking down on you. After all, showing you at your best is LITERALLY my job.

That looking-down-on-you and you looking up, makes you feel like a child, not a business peer or sfellow adult omeone I can or would want to connect with for either social or business purposes. When I am photographing you in my studio, or out on location, I am very conscious and intentional to bring the pose, the lighting, lens selection all together for a photo you love and a photo that delivers strong, positive results. Perfecting a specific posing technique is the right answer.

To recap: trying to avoid the “fat neck look” by simply raising the chin, is not the answer and makes you look like a dwarf. You may look like a dwarf that lacks a double-chin, but a dwarf nevertheless. You want to be received with respect as a peer, not someone trying to HIDE something in their photo, like hiding an unattractive neck.

Pushing the head forward, exactly towards the camera lens to DEFINE the jawline, and separates visually the jaw from the neck. A defined jaw is easy to have if you are in your twenties and on the thin side, but rarely seen in executive photos of people in their late forties and higher in age. My headshots here show the jaw posed CORRECTLY — something sadly rare in executive headshots by other photographers.

The answer is a chin-forward pose, which is something I’ve become an expert at providing for my photo clients. In the chin-up overcompensation workaround, (like we see in so many selfies) you also risk looking haughty, which, again, is not helpful for photos that create a positive connection between subject and viewer.

Chin-up head angle DOES stretch the neck, making it appear thinner, but at the cost of looking a little strange and making you appear quite short. And if you get it slightly off, you look arrogant, like you are looking down-your-nose at the viewer.

These are two CEO’s. The photographer client on the left was posed wrong with no chin/neck separation. I posed you right for a much better headshot.

In contrast, the professionally-posed face and neck will not have the cons of either looking down on someone or appearing arrogant. Instead, it will show you in the best light to be welcomed and trusted!

These details of knowing how to position the neck and head result in the difference between an off-putting photo, and a photo that helps create trust and more business deals. Let me make you look like the person your clients want to connect with, trust, and do business with! That’s a smart investment.

Marcus is a leading professional photographer in Dallas, TX — photographing people for business purposes, corporate headshots, editorial portraits, and social portraits where his clients want to be seen in the best light for a strong, positive response. www.HeadShotPros.com Studio Bookings at 1–877–858–0071.