Our job as a headshot photographer becomes easier when our clients know a lot about their customers.

During our recent trip to the US, we did headshots for the LinkedIn profile of my sister and brother-in-law's business. They own a pet care business which includes pet boarding, dog walking, pet sitting and grooming among others. 

The purpose of the headshot session is to have a professional profile photo on LinkedIn as some of their customers' associates would like to access them via that media. The normal recourse was to show them in their company uniform but in this case, the objective was to show the owners behind the company who personally run the company themselves. Trustworthiness, premium, approachability, care and confidence were just among the adjectives we had to show in the headshot photos. 

By giving us concrete examples of their customers and their customers' expectations, we were guided accordingly. We avoided generic descriptions. For instance, when we spoke of trustworthiness, we were told that the level of trustworthiness should be at a level where you would entrust valuables to the person. 

When we were told that the photo needed to look confident, we had to make sure that the confidence resonated with somebody who is already very successful in business. 

The perfect match to any professional headshot is not done by satisfying ourselves but by satisfying the expectation of our client's customers. After all, they're the ones who will say "yay" or "nay" to our client's business.