Brooke Team new recruit: headshot and personality portraits

This session produced portraits for a new recruit joining the Brooke Team. The pictures were made at the team's office, and every one of them is outdoors: a brick walkway beside the building, a brick wall behind some frames and a picnic table for others. The surroundings are part of what the portraits say.

The set has two jobs. One is the straightforward professional headshot that a new team member needs for a profile, a team page and introductions. The other is a looser group of personality portraits that show what the person is like when the pose relaxes. Having both from a single session means the same person can look professional in one place and approachable in another.

Working outdoors beside the office also keeps the session simple. Daylight, a wall and a walkway are all within a few steps, so the recruit can move from a formal pose to a relaxed one without a change of location. The brick, the table and the walkway recur across the set, which makes the pictures feel like parts of one visit and not a collection of unrelated frames.

The portrait set runs from the professional headshot at the top of the page, through a seated portrait and a three-quarter pose, to the more informal frames that include a dog.

Two more professional-leaning frames add range. In the first, the recruit sits outdoors and smiles toward the camera. Sitting changes the posture: the shoulders drop slightly, the pose looks easier and the picture feels less formal than a straight-on standing headshot, while still being clearly a business portrait.

In the second, the recruit is photographed in a three-quarter portrait on the brick walkway. A three-quarter frame shows more of the body than a headshot, usually down to the thighs or waist, so the clothing, the stance and the walkway all become part of the image. The brick lines of the walkway lead the eye through the picture.

Both frames keep the recruit comfortably in the picture, with the brick behind them and nothing in the frame that pulls attention from the face. Small differences, such as whether the body turns toward or away from the camera, change the mood more than a change of background would.

Together, these two pictures give a team more than one format to choose from. A seated portrait suits a relaxed profile or an introduction, and a three-quarter portrait suits a page with more space for a picture.

What ties the polished and the playful pictures together is the setting. The same brick and daylight appear in the formal portrait, the seated portrait and the frames with the dog, so the personality pictures still read as the same person at the same workplace. That continuity is useful for personal branding, because a profile can mix formal and casual pictures without looking like it was assembled from different sources.

A team member’s online presence usually asks for two kinds of pictures. A clean headshot is the safe choice for a directory or a formal profile. A personality portrait is what makes a profile feel like a person. Making both in one visit is efficient, and it lets the person choose which side of themselves a given page needs.

Several of the frames are vertical with space around the person, and that matters for flexibility. A vertical portrait can be cropped closer for a small profile picture, kept loose for a team page, or cut wider for a banner, depending on where it will be used. Leaving room around the subject when photographing is what makes those later crops possible.

For a new team member, that range also supports personal branding. A recruit who shows up with a polished headshot, a seated portrait and a few relaxed pictures has options for an introduction on social media, a team page, an email signature or a welcome message. A set like this can support all of those uses.

If you are bringing new people onto a team, see headshots for professionals and teams, read about matching new employee headshots with existing team photos, or look at the separate Brooke Team headshot event for how a whole team can be photographed in one session.