How to Prepare for a Corporate Headshot in Detroit

A corporate headshot is a thirty-second judgment compressed into a single frame. Recruiters scan a LinkedIn photo for less than a second before deciding whether to keep reading. The work you put in the night before, and the hour before, determines whether that frame reads as competent, warm, and current, or tired, dated, and forgettable. This guide walks through what to do in the seven days, seven hours, and seven minutes before you sit on the stool at 2921 E Jefferson Ave. ## Start With the End Use in Mind Decide where the photo will appear before you decide what to wear. A LinkedIn thumbnail crops to a tight circle that hides everything below the collarbone, so a $400 blazer and a $20 t-shirt photograph identically inside that circle. A company website biography page, by contrast, often runs the full chest, and a website hero image may show shoulders to waist. The crop dictates the wardrobe, not the other way around. Bring three garments if you are unsure: one open-collar shirt, one collared shirt, one structured jacket. Most corporate clients at our studio finish the session having shot all three and chosen in the proof gallery. Switching tops takes ninety seconds and costs nothing inside a $149 starting session; what you cannot recover is a missed look you wish you had captured. Think about the medium beyond LinkedIn. Press releases, conference programs, board decks, and bylines each have their own aesthetic. A federal agency biography page tends toward formal and centered. A tech startup About page tends toward casual and off-center. If you sit on a nonprofit board and serve as a partner at a law firm, you may need two distinct looks from the same session. ## Sleep, Water, and the Week Before Sleep is the single most visible variable in a headshot. Two consecutive nights of seven and a half hours flattens the under-eye shadow that no retoucher can fully erase without making the skin look plastic. The week before the shoot, push bedtime back by an hour and eliminate the late drink that breaks the second half of the night. Drink water on a schedule, not on thirst. Three liters a day for the three days before the shoot plumps the skin and reduces the fine creases around the eyes that read as fatigue. Cut salt the day before; sodium pulls water into the wrong places and softens the jawline. Skip the salty restaurant meal Thursday if you shoot Friday morning. Sun exposure the week of the shoot is a trap. A fresh tan looks orange under studio strobes, and a sunburn looks like a rash. If you golfed Saturday and shoot Tuesday, the photo will show it. Stay in the shade or wear a hat the week before; the studio lighting will give you a healthy color without UV damage. ## Wardrobe That Survives the Crop Solid colors photograph better than patterns at LinkedIn thumbnail size. A small herringbone or pinstripe that looks sharp in person turns into a vibrating moire on a phone screen at 200 pixels wide. Save the patterns for the in-person meeting and wear solids for the camera. Choose a color that contrasts your skin tone and the backdrop. Detroit Photography shoots most corporate work on a neutral gray, which means navy, deep green, burgundy, and charcoal all separate cleanly. White shirts blow out under strobe unless paired with a darker jacket. Light blue is the safest dress-shirt color for almost every complexion. Avoid logos, brand names, and conference-swag polos. A photograph that ties you to a company you leave in eighteen months is a photograph you cannot use after eighteen months. The same principle applies to a tie pin from a board you may rotate off, or a lapel pin from a campaign that may end. The headshot should outlast the wardrobe choices inside it. Press the shirt the night before and hang it on the hanger you will wear it on. Fold creases across the chest and shoulders show up in every frame and cost real retouching time. Pack the jacket folded inside-out so the lapels do not crush during the drive down Jefferson. ## Grooming, Hair, and Makeup Schedule a haircut ten to fourteen days before the shoot, not the day before. A fresh cut reads as fresh to the barber and stiff to the camera; two weeks of growth softens the line at the temples and the back of the neck. The same rule applies to color treatments, which need a week to settle. Shave the morning of the shoot if you shave at all. A five o'clock shadow at 2 PM photographs as a smudge under the jaw. If you wear a beard, trim the neckline the night before and the cheek line the morning of; the camera will read both as deliberate rather than overgrown. Hire the makeup artist if you can afford the $175 add-on. Studio strobes are unkind to bare skin in a way phone cameras are not; they show every pore, every patch of redness, every shine. A professional artist evens the tone in ten minutes and saves an hour of retouching, which on a multi-image order pays for itself. The HMUA add-on at Detroit Photography covers both makeup and a hair touch-up and books on the same calendar as the photo session. Bring a pressed-powder compact if you handle your own makeup. Even men benefit from a quick dust on the forehead and nose to kill the shine the lights catch. Your makeup artist or photographer will hand it back to you between setups; the difference between a shiny frame and a matte one is two seconds of powder. ## What to Bring and What to Eat Pack a small kit the night before so you are not improvising at 7 AM. The kit should hold a lint roller, a Tide pen, a small mirror, a comb or brush, your pressed powder, a clear lip balm, and a backup shirt in a garment bag. If you wear glasses, bring the case so you can switch between with-glasses and without-glasses frames at the studio. Anti-reflective coating is worth the cost on the lenses you plan to wear in the photo. Eat a real breakfast two hours before the shoot. Low blood sugar reads on the face as a hollowness around the eyes and a tightness at the mouth. Eggs, toast, and a piece of fruit work; a protein bar in the car does not. Avoid coffee within the last hour before the shoot if caffeine makes you jittery, because the camera reads small tremors as tension. Arrive ten minutes early. The studio sits at 2921 E Jefferson Ave, Suite 101, in a brick building two blocks east of the Renaissance Center with metered street parking and a small lot in back. The address is straightforward by car from downtown, Corktown, or the Pointes; from the suburbs, take I-375 south to Jefferson and turn east. Use the ten minutes to settle, drink water, and let the makeup artist work without rushing. ## What Happens in the Studio A session opens with a five-minute conversation about how the photo will be used. The photographer adjusts the lighting and backdrop based on whether you need a single LinkedIn frame, a website biography image, or a press-kit collection. Companies that have sent us executives include IBM, GM, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, FORVIA, Eli Lilly, Henry Ford Hospital, and the City of Detroit; the conversation is shorter when you arrive with a clear use case. Live tethering puts each frame on a 27-inch monitor within two seconds of the shutter. You see what the camera sees, in real time, and can adjust the angle of the chin, the position of the shoulder, or the choice of expression based on the previous frame. Posing coaching comes with every session at no additional charge; the photographer will walk you through the small adjustments that separate a flattering frame from a stiff one. In-studio pricing runs $149 for the first selected and retouched image and $99 for each additional image. On-location pricing, for sessions shot at your office or a Detroit landmark, runs $299 per hour wit