Best Foote forward +cool art

My personal favorite. Read below to see her selection!

Last week, I took head shots for local entrepreneur Lisa Foote, who wanted something with a little more of her personality and fun than her corporate portrait offered. We came up with a cool idea involving cell phones and gardening (she works with phones, and gardens at home), and I was happy to take a shot at helping her express her true personality online.

This head shot, as many do, had a very specific function: Mostly to serve as a profile photo on sites such as LinkedIn, and especially as the icon on Twitter. Like another recent head shot session, this made it very easy to narrow down technical needs. However, things were not as cut and dry this time, despite truly needing only one image out of the work.

We started off with a slightly more elaborate idea, which would have been cool, but really wouldn’t have served the purpose as well. When you are running images as small as icons (about 50×50 pixels or even at 500×500), you have to have things presented in a way that tells you a lot without showing you much. Thinking like this can really help you realize what’s important, and what really tells the story.

But this is what counts out of all of that: Lisa, cell phones and a plant. Taking place of our elaborate idea was her head (obviously), a potted plant and a handful of phones. The phones would be arranged to look like they were growing (cell phone development, get it?!), and the phone plant would be held close to her head, making it an easy crop for Web profiles.

From there, the only hard part was finding the right setting and managing to get Lisa’s true personality across. She’s much more fun and lively than a stiff corporate portrait, so a light conversation and some joking pretty much does the job. I guess the main tip here is to just be yourself and not get hung up in technical details, even though they are still there.

And in that spirit, I will save my word count and remind you again that lighting is just part of the game. When you are working with people, they matter the most.

Her selection.

Twitter (look here for the profile crop!): https://twitter.com/footenotes
Her business: http://kwingo.net/

Almost forgot this:

I’m participating in this contest on super-connected artist Natasha Wescoat’s blog. She’s really on the cutting edge of being a self-promoting artist on the web, and she does great work, to boot. Her art can be seen here, and her blog is rather entertaining and informative, as is her Twitter.

So check out the contest here, and maybe I can win! Thanks!