Divine Shots Photography
WHAT DOES YOUR HEADSHOT SAY ABOUT YOU?
A professional business headshot conveys trust and professionalism to potential clients about you and your organization. It helps others get to know whom they are going to do business with, as well as see the face behind the ideas of the products they are using, or the service they are buying. It’s important to show a photo of you within the last 1-3 years, versus 5+ years ago.
Visitors to your website don’t read every word that is on the page. In fact, 79% of people scan a website and only 16% read websites word-for-word. However, 82% will pause longer on a photograph on a website, according to Neilsen’s Media Research.
Here are 10 ways to use professional business headshots in your organization:
1. On your website for bios of your leadership team or key employees
2. Within your email signature along with your company’s contact information
3. On social media and networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn
4. In annual reports
5. Within corporate catalogs, brochures, or advertising collateral
6. Company publications
7. Press releases and other announcements
8. Marketing materials
9. Articles and newspapers
10. On your business card
Give a Happy Memory, Get a Happy Memory! This year we are supporting the North Valley Family YMCA to collect food for Thankgiving Basket Drive. Donate 20 cans of food or $20 cash/check & Receive a 4x6 portrait of your little Trick or Treater at North Valley Family YMCA….
On Thursday, I have an exhibition of all the portraits that I took in September. I had such a beautiful time with all the participants. I am so much thankful to all the participants for trusting in me and being a part of my project. U-Frame-It Gallery has donated all the frames and Barone’s Pizza has offered to provide pizza at half price. I feel I am blessed with all the good people around me. Thank you everyone for your support. Please do come on Thursday, October 11th at 5:30 - 7:30.
1st day of my project “Thirty Days, One Cause”. 83 year old grandpa and his granddaughter. I tried to capture the special bond between them.
I am super excited to offer a wonderful opportunity to senior citizens who are 60+. I have challenged myself on a mission to photograph 30 seniors over a period of 30 days, and provide complimentary sessions plus 8x10 art portraits. The ultimate goal is to fundraise for the Alzheimer’s Association. Please support this honorable cause by spreading the word. For more details, contact me at 818.451.3316.
Choosing an appropriate lens aperture:
I hope that you folks got a chance to play with the Aperture Priority mode on your camera. Continuing from last week’s tip about aperture, let’s see what’s involved in selecting the right aperture for a given situation.
If your subject is a single person, you would set a large aperture like f/2.8 or f/4 (remember large apertures have smaller F numbers, and smaller apertures have large F numbers), and then focus on your subject. This will throw the background out of focus and render a pleasing portrait.
On the other hand, if you are photographing a large group of say 5-6 people, setting a smaller aperture like f/8 would ensure all people in the group appear sharp in the picture.
After changing aperture and before taking the picture you do have to take care of another aspect: The “Shutter Speed”. Yes, there is more to the equation than it would appear! But the best things in life are not simple. We shall continue on this next week. Any questions or comments are always welcome. Until then, take care.
Get off the “P” mode:
Now we’re talking. Let’s get down to some serious business. Today’s tip is going to be a bit lengthy, but I can assure you this will be the best investment in time, and will go a long way towards making your pictures more than just snapshots. Because I believe it’s not about just taking a picture, but making one!
I would guess this is one of the most dreaded transitions for a photographer, but believe me, once you cross the hurdle, you will feel extremely liberated and realize what you had been missing. It will open up new avenues of creativity. OK, with that said, lets jump right in, shall we?
In most cameras the auto mode is called as (P)rogram mode or AE (Auto Exposure) mode. This is what we want to get off of. For a quick snapshot it’s OK to use the P mode. But if you want to get more creative and have greater control over your pictures, it’s best not to rely on your camera to take all the decisions for you. A great starter for getting off the P mode is changing the dial so that it now points to a setting shown as “A” or “Av” on some cameras. This is called as the Aperture Priority setting, and tells the camera that you are going to select the aperture. By the way, if you are wondering what Aperture means, well, it simply controls the opening of your camera lens. This in turn controls how much light is passed in through the lens that eventually hits the camera sensor. Aperture is expressed as F-stops. For example, you might have seen references to values like F2.8 or f/2.8. The smaller the F-stop number, the larger the lens opening (aperture). Typical aperture values are 1.4 2.0 2.8 4 5.6 8 11 16 22. At first these figures might look intimidating, or even put you off thinking “Now, do I have to do math?”. But rest assured, once you start using them, it becomes second nature, and you don’t necessarily need to memorize anything at all. It just becomes second nature, after some practice.
For now let’s consider a simple experiment:
Set your aperture to the lowest value your lens will allow. This could be either 1.4, 2.8, 4.5 or 5.6 depending upon the lens you have. Now take a picture of a person. Next, take the same picture with the aperture set to say f/11. You can see how pleasing the earlier picture looks. What you have just done is helped isolate your subject from the background. In other words, you have your subject in sharp focus, throwing the background out of focus. This makes your subject pop out from the surroundings.
There are a lot of ways you can use the aperture setting to your advantage. I don’t want to overwhelm you by listing all the possible techniques right now. We will go into detail on each one via subsequent tips in the coming weeks.
In the meanwhile, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to ask here. No question is silly. We are all learning all the time. So, please don’t hesitate to ask. Have a nice week ahead!
My First Movie Shoot : (Stills from Behind the scenes)
Last week I was working on a movie sets at different locations. It was my first experience working on a movie set and I really enjoyed it and realized movie making is a very tedious and hectic job for the actors, movie makers as well as for the photographers and the entire crew. It was a short movie written/directed and produced by Sunil Narkar. Here are some of the stills from the sets.
