Business Headshots: How to Get Good Ones for Your Whole Team

What a good business headshot looks like

Five things, and you can check all of them in ten seconds:

That is the whole standard. Everything else in this guide is how to hit it for more than one person at a time.

• Your face is the subject. Head and shoulders, face filling about 60 percent of the frame. Not a full-body shot, not a photo taken from across the room.
• Eyes visible, looking at the camera. A natural, relaxed smile — the one you have when talking to someone you like. No sunglasses, no hat brim, no hair over the eyes.
• Even light on the face. Soft daylight from a window, or even light from the front. No hard shadows across the eyes, no bright window behind you turning you into a silhouette.
• A plain background. Soft grey, warm white, or a gently blurred office. Nothing busy, nothing that pulls the eye away from your face.
• It looks like you today. Recent, not years old. If a client would not recognise you from it at a meeting tomorrow, it is out of date.

Where business headshots show up

The same photo does several jobs, which is why it is worth getting right once:

One consistent set of photos across all of these looks far more professional than a mix of old conference shots, cropped holiday photos, and different backgrounds.

• Your team page. The place clients look first when they want to know who they are dealing with.
• LinkedIn. Your profile photo, and the photo next to your name in search results and comments — usually seen tiny, in a circle.
• Proposals and pitch decks. A face next to a name makes a team feel real before the first meeting.
• Email signatures and speaker pages. Small photos, seen often, that build familiarity over time.
• Press and about pages. Journalists and partners reuse the photo you give them — give them a good one.

What to wear for business headshots

Wear what you would wear to an important meeting in your own field — not your most formal outfit, and not your most relaxed one.

• Solid, simple colours photograph best. Dark blue, grey, black, and soft white all work. Skip loud patterns, thin stripes, and visible logos — they distract and they date the photo.
• Match your industry, not a magazine. A lawyer and a startup founder should not dress the same for this photo, because their clients expect different things. Dress like your clients expect you to look.
• Keep it consistent across the team. You do not need matching outfits — that looks like a school photo. But if one person wears a suit and another wears a t-shirt, the team page looks uneven. Agree on a simple level of dress first: for example, "smart shirt or blouse, no tie needed."
• Skip hats, sunglasses, and anything that covers your face. Glasses you normally wear are fine — they are part of how people recognise you.

Which background works best

The background should be so boring that nobody notices it. Three options work:

What does not work: a cluttered office, a street scene, a patterned wall, or a different background for every person on the team page. The background is the easiest place to make a team look consistent — pick one and use it for everyone.

• Plain light grey or warm white. The safest choice, and the easiest to keep the same for everyone.
• A softly blurred office. Works if the blur is strong — the background should be colour and shape, not readable detail.
• A plain wall in good daylight. Free, and fine, as long as the wall is clean and the light is even.

The team problem: consistency

One person's headshot is a photo. A team's headshots are a set, and the set is judged as a whole. The common failures:

The fix is a simple rule, agreed before anyone takes a photo: same framing (head and shoulders), same background type, same level of dress, all recent. Then the only thing left is how you produce them.

• Different backgrounds. One person against a white wall, one in a park, one in a dark office. The team page looks thrown together.
• Different crops and sizes. One close-up, one full-body shot, one photo taken from below. No two photos sit comfortably side by side.
• Different ages. Photos taken years apart, some from a previous job, some from a holiday. A client notices, even if they cannot say what is wrong.
• Missing people. Half the team has a photo and half has a grey placeholder. An unfinished team page is worse than no team page.

Book a photographer

A studio photographer gives you the best result and the most control — a real person in the room, adjusting the light and the pose. The trade-off is cost and time. A studio headshot in the United States costs $100 to $1,000, and most people pay near $250 for one session, according to the price guides checked for our cost post on 21 Oct 2026. For a team, the fee is only part of it: you also pay for set-up, for lining up everyone's time, and for the hours people spend away from their work. One guide worked out a photo day for a 100-person company across three cities at about $21,000 to over $60,000 in total.

A photographer is worth it when the photos will be used for years — for founders, senior leaders, and anyone whose face is on the front of the business. For the rest of a team page, the cost is hard to justify.

Take them yourselves with a phone

Free, and better than most people expect, if you do it properly. Face a window in soft daylight, put the phone at eye level on a shelf, use the timer, and take plenty of photos so you can pick the best expression. Good light and a plain background matter more than the camera.

The catch is consistency: ten people taking their own photos in ten different rooms will not match, and someone has to check every photo, crop it the same way, and chase the people who never send one in. It works well for one or two people. For a team, it becomes a small project of its own.

Make them from selfies

This is different from uploading a selfie. An AI headshot tool takes selfies of a person and makes a proper headshot from them — same framing, same background, no studio visit, and everyone on the team can do it from wherever they are.

Headshotsly works this way: each person uploads up to 5 selfies, and the photos are ready in about 2 minutes. You get one full-HD photo free, with no watermark, so you can check the result before spending anything. If you want more, the full set is five 4K photos for a one-time $4.99 per person. For a team, each person uses their own selfies — nobody needs to be in the same place or book a day — and the person running it makes the photos from the dashboard.

The honest trade-off: this does not buy you a photographer's eye in the room. It buys you a clean, work-ready photo, fast, that looks consistent across the whole team. Check the free photo against the five-point list above before it goes on your team page.

How to run it for a team, step by step

• Agree the look first. One background type, one level of dress, head-and-shoulders framing. Write it down in one sentence and send it to everyone.
• Tell each person what to upload. Clear, recent selfies, in good daylight, no filters, wearing what they will wear in the photo. Glasses on if they normally wear them.
• Make one person's photo first. Check it against the five-point list at the top of this guide. If it passes, the look is settled — run the rest the same way.
• Check every photo at small size. Team pages and LinkedIn show these photos small. Shrink each one down on your phone and look at it from arm's length. If the face, eyes, and smile still read clearly, it passes.
• Replace the placeholders. A team page with every photo in the same style is the finish line. Do not leave grey boxes — they are the first thing a visitor notices.

Checklist: before a business headshot goes live

If a photo fails one of these, fix that one thing. A business headshot is a small file that does a large job — for one person, and even more for a whole team.

• Head and shoulders, face filling most of the frame
• Eyes visible, looking at the camera, natural smile
• Even light, no hard shadows, no bright window behind
• Plain background — the same type as the rest of the team
• Wearing what you would wear to an important meeting in your field
• Looks like you today, not years ago
• Passes the small-size test: still clear as a thumbnail
• No heavy filters or editing — it should look like you on a good day