Canada is currently in the middle of a federal election campaign. Let’s take a look at the business headshots of the party leaders and all the candidates. (Note that political party web sites change from time to time especially with regard to information about their leader.)
If you have a few minutes, click on the links to each party’s candidate page and browse the portraits. Which ones do you like, which ones do you ignore? Why? Is it the lighting, the smile (or lack of), the eyes (or lack of eye contact), the background, or maybe something else? Which ones get your vote based only on their business portrait?
Liberal Party
There are no media-friendly photos of party leader Trudeau on the Liberal site. Only two parties, the NDP and PPC, still provide media handouts of pictures, logos and even party colours.
As with all the parties, you can easily tell which Liberal candidate used a professional photographer and which didn’t. Some candidates don’t have a business headshot. There are a few cut-and-paste heads where the head was cut from another photo.
New Democrat Party (NDP)
While the NDP leader’s portrait is very nice, you can’t say the same about all the NDP candidates. Many headshots were obviously cut out from other pictures and a few weren’t. Some of these cut outs were very amateurishly done. Why even bother doing this? Were the backgrounds that bad?
If you want a reasonably consistent look, tell every candidate that they must supply a headshot on, say, Slate Gray #26 or its equivalent Quartz Gray #50. Every professional photographer knows what that is and can easily do it. Or even easier, be like real estate agents and do it on white so that the background is easy to remove or blend.
Definitely tell your candidates that cell-phone selfies are forbidden!
Conservative Party
The Conservative candidate page presents more cut-out heads. On the main candidates page, each headshot uses last year’s trendy circular crop but the page looks clean, casual and consistent. On each candidate’s own bio page, you can see that, while many Conservative candidates used a professional photographer, the quality of the cut out varies from good to sloppy.
Green Party
The Green Party candidate headshots are a mix of professional portraits, personal snapshots and cell-phone selfies. There are lots of cut-out heads. Some of the cut outs are embarrassingly amateurish. Why were some heads cut out and not others?
One headshot file size is 18.5 MB (it’s the one that loads really sloooowly). Another has an image size of 63 MB but almost half of that (about 28 MB) is just white space added above the candidate’s head – another poorly done cut out.
People’s Party of Canada (PPC)
Bernier is the only male party leader wearing a tie. He’s also wearing a brown suit which isn’t common for party leaders or business executives. Does his clothing affect your perception of him?
A pure white background will disappear on a white page and the person’s head will look like it’s floating on the page. This portrait of Bernier was smart to use a slight grey tone which acts as a frame on a white page.
What about the PPC candidate photos? Nothing to see here. The PPC web site has only links to candidate web sites. A quick look at all those web sites shows about 30 professional portraits of varying quality and the rest are amateur snapshots and selfies.
Bloc Québécois (BQ)
All the portraits on its candidate page are tiny but well done. It looks like the BQ was the only party that used a professional photographer for all its headshots. My guess is that all the candidates were shot on a white background and then the headshots were dropped onto a common background. Overall it’s a very consistent, professional look. It’s too bad the faces are so small (but the page has many coding errors so maybe the small pictures were supposed to link to larger versions).
Good Business Headshots Work
You’re applying for a federal political office job which pays at least $167,400 per year plus benefits. So how much effort are you going to put forth? Do you campaign with an expectation of winning or not? (Not all candidates actually expect to win.) It costs a lot of money to campaign but surely your public professional image is worth more than a selfie?
Business headshots are always important and not just for politicians. For many business people, a portrait is the only connection between you and your customers. A portrait should be much more than a glorified driver’s licence picture.
Business portraits are used to build trust. A properly done, professional, business portrait is effective at winning your customer’s vote. Anything less than professional is, at best, hit and miss.
