Last week, I photographed a small conference involving a number of mayors, several municipal, provincial and federal government bureaucrats, a few university professors and some company presidents.
As is my routine, I made sure every finished picture had an embedded photo caption which included the name and title of each person in the photo. Fortunately for me, everyone wore a conference name tag which made identification fairly easy.
But several name tags were partially obscured by clothing. No problem! As long as I had a partial name or job title, I could do a Web search to (eventually) find the full information.
After doing searches for sixteen people, I noticed that all of these folks were using old business portraits of themselves. For example:
• A university professor at the conference was seemingly in his mid to late 60s with a bit of white hair surrounding his mostly bald head. But on his school’s web site, his portrait showed him in his mid 40s(?) with a full head of brown hair.
• A tech company’s president in her late 40s(?) had short grey-brown hair at the conference. But her web site portrait looked like it was shot back in her university days when she had long blonde hair.
• At the conference, a city’s senior administrator appeared to be in his late 50s with a grey moustache and completely bald head. Online, he was unrecognizable: maybe 25 years younger, clean shaven and a full head of dark curly hair.
• Many of the other business headshots looked one or two decades old based on the out-of-date style of photography.
Sadly we can’t stay young forever. The 1980s, 1990s and 2000s may have been good years but we’re now midway into the second decade of the 21st century. The purpose of a business portrait is to show who you are, not who you were or who you’d like to be.
Business headshots have a natural shelf life of a just a few years. Yes, time moves quickly. After that period of time, you should retire the past, no matter how good you looked back then, and get a new portrait. Your customers want to see who you are today not who you used to be.
A new business headshot will update not only your physical appearance but also your business appearance. Remember that an old portrait also makes your business look old and behind the times.
