The four kinds of headshot, and which one you need
Most enquiries start with “I need a headshot” and nothing else, which is a bit like walking into a shop and asking for a coat, no colour, no season, no idea whether it is for a wedding or a hike. The crop, the background and the expression all change depending on where the photograph is going, and so does the price.
LinkedIn and professional profile
A close head-and-shoulders crop, a plain mid-grey or white background, a natural half-smile. This is what most people need: three images, one final choice, £150. It has to read clearly at the size a LinkedIn thumbnail shrinks it to, which rules out anything busy behind you.
Corporate and executive
Corporate and executive sittings take a wider crop, often including a jacket or a slice of the office, with a more formal expression and sometimes an environmental background showing a boardroom or a window. Boards and annual reports want this version. It costs more than a standard sitting because it runs longer and usually needs a second look for print.
Actor and performer
Minimal retouching, a natural expression, often two contrasting looks in one sitting. Casting directors need to see the face that will turn up to the audition, not a smoothed version of it. I’d argue most people booking an “actor headshot” for a LinkedIn profile are buying the wrong thing: it costs more and delivers a rawer image than a corporate profile actually needs.
Personal brand
Looser, warmer, sometimes with a hint of personality in the pose. Consultants, coaches and founders use this one most. If you want more range than a fixed backdrop and a fixed pose gives you, a personal portrait session covers that ground better than a headshot booking does.
How much headshots cost in London
An individual sitting is £150. A team of ten or more brings the per-head price down to £60–£110, depending on group size and location. The table below sets it out.
| Booking | What it covers | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Individual session | 20–30 minutes, 3–5 retouched images | £150 |
| Two to four people | Same set-up, priced per person | £120 per person |
| Team of five to nine | One room, one backdrop, back-to-back slots | £95 per person |
| Team of ten or more | On-site, 12–15 people an hour once set up | £60–£110 per person |
| Executive session | Longer sitting, extra looks, print-ready retouching | £250 |
| Actor package | Casting-standard set, minimal retouching | £180 |
| Setup and travel | Zones 1–3 included; further out | +£30 |
| Extra retouching | Beyond the standard clean-up, per image | £8–£25 |
What actually moves the per-head number: group size, whether I am shooting from one fixed station or moving between rooms, and how many looks each person gets. Sixty people in one room with one backdrop costs less per head than the same sixty photographed across three separate offices. See full pricing across every service for how headshots compare with everything else I shoot, and a full breakdown of headshot costs for the reasoning behind each figure above.
On-site team shoots: what I need from you
A room roughly three metres deep, one power socket, and a wall you can ignore entirely because I bring my own backdrop. Once the room is set up, I can photograph twelve to fifteen people an hour. Setup takes about forty minutes, packing down another twenty.
Named schedules beat queues, every time. Slot people in by name and time rather than asking them to turn up “sometime after lunch,” and the day runs to plan. What goes wrong, reliably: a glass-walled meeting room booked at noon, with the sun coming straight through and blowing out every frame, or a lobby with people walking through mid-shot. I’d rather you gave me a windowless room with a door that shuts.
Send me this a week before the day:
- A confirmed room booking, with the room’s dimensions if you have them
- The full name list, in the order people are shooting
- Where the nearest power socket is
- Any brand colours you want reflected in the background
For a bigger brief that folds in team and office shots on the same day, wider corporate photography covers that combination, and how many headshots fit into an hour breaks the throughput down by group size.
Studio or your office — the honest comparison
A studio gives me full control: fixed light, a clean backdrop, no meeting rooms getting double-booked out from under us. Coming to your office saves each person the travel, which for a team of six adds up to roughly twelve hours saved between them. That is real, but not enough to outweigh the quality a studio gives a small group.
For a team of sixty, the maths flips. Twelve hours becomes well over a hundred, and no boardroom is worth losing that much work time. For a team of six, I’d book the studio. For a team of sixty, I am coming to you instead, for office and team photography.
Backgrounds and what they signal
Grey is the safest choice: it separates most skin tones and hair colours and does not fight a company’s brand palette. Most photographers default to white because it looks clean in a portfolio, and I’d disagree for anything above a handful of sittings, since white is unforgiving on a pale shirt or blonde hair, either of which can vanish straight into it.
Black looks sharp in a boardroom, corporate-legal everywhere else. An environmental background, an office or a slice of City skyline, looks good on day one and dates within a year, the moment the desk behind you moves. See choosing a headshot background for the full comparison, and headshots from London teams for examples of each.
Matching headshots across a remote team
The genuine problem: eleven people across six cities, photographed by four different photographers over eight months, all needing to sit on one page looking like a single shoot. What makes headshots match is the crop, the background value, the eye height in frame and the retouching level, agreed in advance and followed by whoever holds the camera.
What does not matter nearly as much: the camera itself. Two different cameras, set up the same way, produce images nobody can tell apart once they are side by side on a website. keeping a remote team’s headshots consistent covers the spec sheet I send to a photographer when I am not shooting every city myself.
What to wear, and the twenty minutes before the camera
Solid mid-tones photograph best. Fine stripes and small checks flicker under a camera sensor in a way the eye doesn’t catch live, so avoid them, and bring a second top in case the first reads oddly once we’ve taken a few frames.
The real point, and it is the one people skip: most people photograph badly for the first three minutes in front of a camera and well after that. A rushed five-minute slot catches you at your worst. Twenty minutes gets past it, most of the time without either of us noticing the moment it happened. what to wear for a headshot covers the detail on colours and fabric.
Retouching: what’s included and what isn’t
Included on every sitting:
- Skin evened out and shine reduced
- Stray hairs and flyaways tidied
- A spot or blemish that would be gone within a fortnight anyway
Not included: reshaping a jaw, taking years off a face, changing a body. I turn those down, because the point of a headshot is to look like you, not a smoother version of somebody else. how much retouching is too much covers where that line sits, request by request.
When you don’t need a professional headshot
A good phone photo, taken in even window light with a plain wall behind you, beats a badly lit studio headshot most of the time. If you are updating one LinkedIn photo between proper shoots, or you are a freelancer with a decent window and a steady hand, that is often enough. I won’t pretend otherwise just to sell you a sitting you don’t need.
Who cannot avoid this: anyone on a company page that has to match a team set, actors who need a casting-standard image, and anyone in a regulated profession where a directory template fixes the background and crop. For those, a phone photo simply will not pass.
Get in touch and tell me your team size and postcode, and I’ll reply within one working day with dates and a price.
Headshots in your part of London
Most headshot bookings come from three areas, and each has its own practical wrinkle, so they have their own pages: headshots in Shoreditch for studios and agencies around EC2A, headshots in the City of London where meeting-room ceilings and loading restrictions shape the setup, and headshots in Canary Wharf for teams inside the towers. Anywhere else in London, this page is the one you want.