Many professional photographers know how to achieve results like this and it isn’t difficult. If your business headshot with eyeglasses doesn’t look like this then your photographer failed.
A company this week asked to have its business headshots retouched. The photos were shot by a cheap photographer.
How do I know it was a cheap photographer? The pictures were shot in their office without any flash. There were shadows under the eyes, nose and mouth of every person, the skin colour was off, the eye whites were greyish-blue, and some pictures were out of focus due to camera shake. The portraits of people wearing eyeglasses had very dark eyes, no catchlights, and numerous reflections across the lenses. All the headshots were so noisy that each person’s skin looked like rough sand paper.
It was also painfully obvious that no one was given any posing advice. The portraits looked, at best, like driver’s licence photos where people just stand and stare into the camera.
The company said my retouching fee was higher than what they paid the photographer. But they happily paid it. My retouch fee was $60 per photo. This means they had hired a really cheap photographer.
Had they hired a more experienced (i.e. more expensive) photographer, the portraits would have been more effective because they would have had better lighting, better facial expressions, and better body language. And the company would not have had to pay more to get the photos repaired.
Inexperience Costs More
Another business asked me to fix a number of group photos from its 2023 Christmas party. The posed photos were of each employee and their family in front of a sparkly festive background. But the company was embarrassed by the poor quality photos and asked if they could be fixed.
It was obvious the photographer didn’t use a flash. All the pictures were underexposed, the faces were dark, the eye whites were grey, catchlights were missing, the skin colours were off, some photos were out of focus, and the posing of the groups was atrocious. There was nothing merry about these Christmas photos.
I asked if the company had hired a photographer or if one of their employees did the photos. The person wrote that they hired a photographer for $250. He added, “I guess we got what we paid for.”
My quote was $45 x 58 photos = $2,610 to fix their $250 pictures.
A true professional photographer would’ve charged around $750 – $1000 for this type of event photography. The pictures would not have needed to be fixed afterwards. Had they hired a true professional, they would’ve saved money. The cheap photographer actually cost more.
I’m happy to do retouching work. But I hate seeing people waste money on bad photography. When a photographer has a low price, there’s always a reason why.
If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.
– often attributed to Paul “Red” Adair.
