Matthew Cole | LinkedIn Headshots

Occasionally my work and my interests intersect. In this case, as part of the Displaced Worker group, we had various seminars. One was about using LinkedIn, new to many of the displaced employees. Looking at LinkedIn, it quickly became apparent that a lot of LinkedIn profile pictures are pretty poor. Since I have an interest in photography, I decided to offer free headshots to any of the displaced employees who wanted one. About half of the group took me up on this. I took the photos from further back than needed for a headshot and show them here full frame, though we mostly cropped the photos closer before putting them on LinkedIn. The results are below. A few of these people aren't in the displaced employee group; some survived this round of layoffs, moved to Illinois or were scheduled to retire anyway.

The very first photo is Mike Powers, Executive Director of Minnesota Job Partners, the organization we retained to handle the transition (then, he's taken a new job since). He was over for a meeting and I did his headshot. The second photo is Dan Johnson, longtime colleague and then my superior. If you call references, Dan will be a likely first call. The next one is me. This was a useful thing for our group and pretty straightforward for me to do.

The Headshots

Some Work Chums

The Setup

The Transitional Imaging Project lighting setup

Darryn looks anxious about the lighting set up in the conference room. If you find her above, she's in a different outfit. The houndstooth jacket she has on in this photo looked good in person but was amazingly distracting in the photo.

If you are deeply interested in the photo part of this, the headshots were all taken with a Nikon D700 with an 85 f/1.4 lens. The lighting is 3 Nikon SB600 flashes controlled by a Nikon SU-800 on the camera but I ran them on fractional power rather than full TTL. One flash is used through an umbrella, as seen on the right. The other two fire through a translucent screen I made some years ago of ripstop nylon and PVC pipe to light a bride at a wedding. The background I borrowed from HR; it's what they use as a background for employee badge photos. After looking at the first day's results on the computer, I revised my exposure a bit, hence the variations you see above.

The location is a meeting room on our floor. I reserved the room for the Transitional Imaging Project, a name designed to sound dull enough to deflect any undue outside interest, and set up for a couple of days.

The Displaced Employee Group LinkedIn Headshots

The Headshots

Some Work Chums

The Setup