Preparing for your Business Portraits

A few tips to create a professional business portrait.

What to Wear:
For Men: wear suits or dress pants (unless we're only focusing on your upper body), and consider wearing blazers for your portrait.
For Women: go for professional suits, skirts or pants, and blouses or dresses that you would wear to the office. If we're only taking head and shoulder shots, long sleeves are a good choice.

Solid Colors Are Best: 
Solids create a look that will endure throughout the years. Avoid patterns, stripes, polka-dots and florals. Patterns pull attention to your clothing and away from your face. 

Long Sleeves Are Best:
Less skin is more. Low necklines and short sleeves draw attention away from your face and aren’t recommended for professional portraits. Crew, boat or narrow V-necks are always flattering. It’s best to avoid standup collars or turtlenecks. 

Jackets and Dresses:
Darker colors slenderize. We recommend colors like black, navy, blue, brown, hunter green, burgundy or royal blue. Gray isn’t the best choice if you’ll be photographed against a gray background. 

Men’s Shirts and Ties: 
White dress shirts are ok if contained within a dark suit jacket. Medium-hued solid colors like blue, light brown, taupe, are preferred dress shirt colors with or without jackets. Ties can be solid or stripes in bright power colors like red, yellow, royal blue, etc. It’s best to avoid any type of pinstripes as they present printing problems if printed in magazine or newspapers (moire patterns appear as zebra shaped lines that appear in error when printer or displayed in certain situations).

Women’s Blouses: 
Rich colors and jewel tones are good color choices for most women. Colors like red, yellow, royal blue and purple or medium solid colors like taupe, yellow, gold, pink, or lavender work well. Shiny, satiny fabrics should be avoided if possible. 

Your Face: 
Don’t schedule a facial or any kind of skin treatment within one week of your photo session. Facial shine is detrimental to a great portrait. Any person male or female, with oily, shiny or sweaty skin should use cosmetic powder just prior to the photo session. Please bring cosmetic powder with you to reapply as needed during the photo session.

Ladies should apply normal daytime makeup. The objective is to look natural and not “made up.” 

Your Hair:
It’s not recommended to change your hairstyle just before your photo session. It’s best to have your hair trimmed at lease a week before your photo session. Style your hair and use hairspray to hold it in place. Please bring hair brush and hairspray to your session. 

About Retouching

We think less is better when it comes to retouching. A great retouch looks realistic and you shouldn’t detect much work.