Mindless head shots

Less can be more. Sometimes it isn’t. Keep this in mind as you select an image for an online professional or social site.

Interesting persons with interesting faces should have more character than boring persons with or without interesting faces. Some photographers can sculpt life with light to empower, enhance and embolden the faces of interesting persons. Bland, boring, blank faces of any age or gender benefit from skilled use of photographic techniques.

The fact is that in real-life situations a subject may look as they did in the skilled photographer’s image. But because those images are inspired and inspiring, that person in real-life, under normal every day conditions, likely will not and should not be expected to appear with the same strength of character and strong willed expression viewed in his “portrait.”

A real portrait must convey something other than merely how a person looks. It tells us something about that person other than appearances. Great people often are remembered by an image created in a moment of being great —reaching a goal, making a point, achieving the impossible. That image then becomes their timeless portrait. But in some small way, each of us can have our moments of greatness too. That is a potential we probably all aspire to, and that is far from blandness. 

Mug shots are the opposite. They identify the subject. They show how the person looks. We are physically three-dimensional, but mug shots barely show a hint of the third dimension because to show depth, lighting would have to be positioned in specific relation to the subject to control where the shadows fall. That very sensitive positioning will affect how the person looks. To prevent this artificial influence on the appearance of the image, forensics imagery is often flat, bland, and boring. That is the Mug Shot.