Two independent financial advisers walked into my studio at Rendlesham knowing exactly what they wanted. That does not happen as often as you might think. Neil Summers and Jordan Durrant run Everwealth, an independent financial advice firm covering Ipswich, Colchester and the surrounding area, and they arrived prepared, in the right clothes, with a clear idea of how the images needed to work. The session was quick as a result. It was also good fun, which always makes the pictures better.
Who Everwealth are
Everwealth advise people on pensions, retirement planning, investments, savings and protection, and they work with business owners and directors too. Their whole approach is built around meeting people face to face, often at home, and explaining things in plain English. Read their client reviews and the same words keep coming up. Approachable. Relaxed. Not rushed. Patient. No jargon, no pressure. Neil is based in Ipswich, Jordan in Colchester, and between them they cover a good stretch of Suffolk and Essex.
That matters for a headshot. When a firm’s entire offer is that a real person will sit at your kitchen table and talk about your money, the photograph on the website has one job. It has to look like the person who is actually going to turn up.
Why financial advisers cannot afford a false impression
Handing someone your pension is not a small decision. Before anyone makes a phone call, they look. They check the website, they check LinkedIn, they look at the face and make a judgement in about two seconds. That judgement is not fair and it is not detailed, but it happens, and it happens before a single word has been exchanged.
So the picture has to be honest. Not flattering to the point of fiction. Honest. If the person in the photograph is not recognisably the person who walks through the door, you have started the relationship with a small lie, and in financial advice that is a bad way to begin.
The problem with AI headshots
We have all had a go with AI now. You upload a few pictures, wait a few minutes, and out comes something that looks like you, sort of, wearing a suit you have never owned, standing in an office that does not exist. Most people find it interesting. Some find it useful, particularly if the picture they had before was a cropped wedding photo or a selfie in a car. For those people, AI does raise the floor.
Here is what it does not do. It does not raise the ceiling. If you already have a decent photograph, running it through an AI tool does not make it better. It makes it smoother, flatter, and more like everybody else’s. AI works by averaging. It has looked at millions of headshots and it gives you the middle of them. That is precisely why AI headshots have started to look identical to each other. The same skin, the same lighting, the same faintly plastic confidence. People are noticing. I have had clients tell me they can spot them now, and once you can spot them, the picture stops working. It stops saying “here is a professional you can trust” and starts saying “here is someone who could not be bothered to be photographed”.
Everyone worries about AI producing a false negative, making someone look worse or odder than they are. Almost nobody talks about the false positive, which is the bigger risk. A picture that makes you look like somebody else entirely is not a win. When you meet the client and you do not match the photograph, they notice. They may not say anything, but they notice, and they file it away.
What we did in the studio
Neil and Jordan came to me at Base Business Park in Rendlesham, on the old RAF Bentwaters site. We shot both of them on two backgrounds, a clean white and a mid grey, so Everwealth have options depending on where the images end up. White works cleanly on a website with a light layout and cuts out easily. Grey has more weight to it and suits LinkedIn, press and anywhere the picture is sitting on its own.
The lighting was soft and broad, positioned to keep the shadows gentle and the eyes clear. Nothing dramatic. A financial adviser does not want a moody portrait. They want to look like a person you could sensibly ask a difficult question. Jordan wore a navy suit, a pale blue shirt and a patterned tie, and his glasses stayed on, which meant working the light so there was no reflection across the lenses. Neil wore a darker navy suit with a white shirt and a plain navy tie.
Neither of them needed much direction, but I gave it anyway, because most people do. I shoot tethered to a large monitor in the studio, so the images come up big and sharp within a second or two of being taken. That means you are not squinting at a thumbnail on the back of a camera and taking my word for it. You can see the picture at proper size, judge it for yourself, and tell me what you want changed. It also settles people down. Most of the nerves in a headshot session come from not knowing what is happening, and seeing a good frame on the screen early in the session tends to fix that. With Neil and Jordan it happened fast, mostly because they were laughing at each other between frames.
What they brought to it
You can usually tell within a few minutes whether someone knows their subject. Neil and Jordan clearly do. They talked about their work without any of the defensive vagueness you sometimes get, and that came through in the pictures. There is a settled quality to someone who is not bluffing. It shows in the eyes and around the mouth, and no amount of retouching can put it there if it is absent.
They were also easy company, which is worth saying because it changes the images. A relaxed subject gives you more usable frames in twenty minutes than a tense one gives you in an hour.
What a professional headshot actually gives you
The finished pictures are Neil and Jordan on their best day. Well lit, well framed, properly retouched to the point where the picture looks clean rather than reworked. I take out the temporary things, a stray hair, a spot, a crease in a collar. I leave the permanent things, because those are the person. A client who meets Neil should recognise him instantly from his photograph, and that recognition is the whole point.
That is what you get from sitting in front of a camera with someone whose job it is to make you look like you. Not a smoothed-out average of everyone in your industry. You.
Headshots for businesses across Suffolk and Essex
I work from my studio at Base Business Park, Rendlesham, near Woodbridge, with free parking on site and space for individuals or small teams. It is an easy run from Ipswich, Woodbridge, Saxmundham and the Suffolk coast, and Colchester and north Essex are well within reach. I also work on location if it makes more sense to come to you.
If you are a local business thinking about updating your team photographs, or you are still using something taken on someone’s phone at a Christmas do, you can get in touch and we can talk about what you need and how the images are going to be used.
See more about my professional headshots in Suffolk.