Posts tagged professional

I promised to share the pics that Beth Buchweitz made of me last week (week before? Time just flies by sometimes). I had SAQA ask for a headshot for the new juried member announcement — and I didn’t have anything in my arsenal that I could use.

For several days, I pondered doing this myself — setting up the camera on the tripod, using the remote — but in the end I decided it would take way too long and probably not look very good. Beth has a good eye and I trusted her to do it right. She said that she tried to do this for herself once and it was a disaster. You end up trying to smile at nothing and the final pic looks phony.

Beth is a great photographer. Even though it was a very bright day, we moved into the shadow of a building and still had good light. This was one of the first ones she took.

She insisted that I laugh and have a genuine smile and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

I ended up liking this one — the last shot. There is no gap in my jacket and I’m more relaxed than the earlier ones.

I cropped it down for the final pic to send to SAQA.

It was a little shocking to me to do this. We all have an image of what we look like in our mind’s eye, and the camera doesn’t always show us that person. I’m not in the selfie generation — so I don’t take many pictures of myself — and as a mom, my job is always to take pictures of other people. As time passes, you don’t realize that you barely have any photographs of yourself — until you do something like this.

When I set up for this shot, I automatically put on a suit. I have two Masters degrees — in my mind, a professional headshot should be in a suit. After the pictures, I realized that this may seem unusual to other artists. Many of them wear more casual and colorful clothing for their head shots — but I suppose this is truly me. Me in a dark suit.