Sports Mode, Landscape Mode, Meat Grinder Mode?

I did a little math the other day and realized I've shot roughly 1,500 corporate headshots in the last four years, but you wouldn't know it from looking at my portfolio or my social media.

If you think you've seen some headshots in my portfolio and this seems surprising to you, let's first define what I consider to be a corporate headshot. A corporate headshot is a photo of an employee specifically taken to a client's standards. It usually has a specific aspect ratio, and subject framing requirements, so that when you go to the company's website, all of the employees have a similar photo and an equal presence on the page. If you look at my website, I do have a lot of corporate-editorial or just editorial portraits, where I'm allowed to make all of the decisions about the crop, the aspect ratio, the lighting the framing, everything. But my website karlnielsenphotography.com has only one real corporate headshot, and the same photo is used again on my Instagram @kidcalifornia page.

Having only one corporate headshot online isn't by accident; I do not want to be defined as a corporate headshot photographer. I sometimes look at the portfolios of other photographers who have built their careers upon corporate headshots alone, and I often find the photos they take and the concept of their business model distasteful. It's as if they said, "Fuck it! I don't want to think about my job anymore, I just want to show up, push the button, and get paid."

In my mind, photography is a craft of artistry, science, and exploration, and when you distill your business down to one very narrow genre, especially corporate headshots, so much of the craft is lost. I feel like headshot specific photographers just put their camera in, "Meat Grinder Mode" and start cranking away. They are merely cranking out headshots so corporate clients can put their employees into clickable, quantifiable boxes on a website just like every other online commodity.

So how do I keep corporate-headshots as a viable part of my business and not gouge my eyes out? I read that Richard Avedon had taken something like100,000 ID photos for the U.S. Merchant Marines before becoming a photographer for Harper's Bazaar. Avedon attributed his experience in the U.S. merchant marines as a formative experience for his career.

Keeping what I know about Avedon's experience in mind, I utilize the headshots assignments to continually explore new and different ways to take corporate headshots within the required parameters. I've changed everything I can, from my light modifiers, my lighting setups, my camera settings, to the way I edit the photos. I've even explored different types of makeup powder and brushes to apply the powder with. Without having such stringent limitations, I would have never considered learning more about makeup. Previously in my mind, that was my subject's or a makeup artist's responsibility. But now I handle even the type and shade of powder that I apply to my subjects.

Despite having to cram unique individuals into standard clickable pre-packaged commodity boxes, I do everything I can to truly capture the person in front of me in the best possible and most unique way that I can. The benefit of having to dive deep on the subtle things is it forced me to develop more of my soft skills, which in turn trickled into all of my other work. After having worked with so many different lighting setups, different types of make I have a much larger quiver of tools to draw upon when needed.

Now more than ever, I look forward to my corporate headshot assignments and think about what I can change and how to do them better each time. I have no interest in becoming a full-time corporate headshot photographer, but I do embrace the challenge, the learned skills and the additional branch of my business model.