What a headshot actually has to survive
Nobody uses a headshot the way it was shot. Here's what happens to it afterwards, and why it changes how I take it.
[Replace this with the real post. What follows is a working draft so you can see the shape of one.]
A headshot is almost never used the way it left the camera. It gets cropped square for LinkedIn, cropped again to a circle for Slack, dropped into a slide at 200 pixels wide, and printed at A5 on a conference badge.
Contrast at the edges matters more than detail in the middle
If the hair and the background are the same tone, the photo dies at small sizes. So separation between subject and background does real work at small sizes.
Shoot wider than you want to
Every platform crops differently and none of them ask first. Shooting a bit wider than the composition you like means the square crop, the circle crop and the 16:9 slide all survive.
Nobody can see the shirt
At the size these get used, what comes through is whether the person looks like someone you'd want to email.