Shows that you care! Most recruiters and hiring managers don't actually care about your actual headshot. What I mean by that, is that they don't care what you're wearing, what you look like, how it's taken, etc.

What they do care about is the fact that you take your professional career serious enough to pay, coordinate and take the time to have a headshot taken.

Why are headshots generally so expensive? The difficult part about explaining this is being able to effectively communicate the behind the scenes process that is takes to produce your headshot. Besides buying/owning the gear and posing practice/research, I have to load up all of my lights, light stands, camera, memory cards, reflector, and charge the batteries for everything. Then drive to the location and unload all of the gear, set up the light stands and lights. After the picture(s) is captures, then I pack it all back up, dive it home, unload it back into the house and begin transferring the files to my computer.

The editing process is what generally takes up most of the time and how photographers justify charging what we do. The software is a minimum of $20/month and then we remove acne, scars, blemishes, stray hairs using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. Adjusting the color, contrast and highlights/shadows comes next. And finally I run a few processes over your image to smooth out your skin in a natural way so you don't look like a mannequin. This process involves a technique called "Frequency Separation" followed by a high pass filter for non-skin areas.

Can I bypass all the fancy editing parts to save money? Unfortunately, no. I take pride in my work and always want to deliver the highest quality product that I'm able to. If I skipped those steps, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night. It's just a part of who I am.

And you want me to be well rested when I take your photo, correct? haha