Free Headshots in Hindsight

The headshot event was a success. That’s the most important thing, I have to say about it, so I’ll say it first. In one day, I happily serviced about 50 people, taking their portrait, so they could use it on LinkedIn, Facebook, with their acting agent or where ever a headshot might come in handy. It took me a while to write this final post about it, simply because I wanted to finish it first. Which I have. All the photos have been retouched and e-mailed out to the participants.

I originally offered 100 free headshots and later raised that number to 120, but I was happy to see that on the day of, there were no enormous lines, no chaos and thus, no catastrophes. Instead, there was a small initial rush of people who had been waiting around, followed by a slow trickle. Much more along the lines of Continue reading

Headshot Event in the Media

My side project of offering up 100 headshots for free has quickly become my main project, thanks to the media taking an interest in it. The story was first picked up by West Seattle Blog, a hyper local news site for my neighborhood. This was quickly followed by a post on the Seattle PI’s ‘Big Blog’, and finally, local news station King 5 put the story [see video clip] on their morning show today, Friday. The event is on Tuesday (for details, see bottom of this post).

A friend told me ahead of time, that a project like this one would be bound to attract media attention, but I really hadn’t expected Continue reading

Charity Head Shots in Seattle

The recession has meant that a large number of people have lost their jobs, and it occurred to me that many of these new job seekers would probably like to have a nice head shot of themselves to attach to linkedin profiles and similar. However, being unemployed also means not having a ton of cash to spend on frivolous things like photographers. So, I decided to give it away.

I found an ally in a local coffee shop, C & P Coffee Co., big enough to let me set up a small shooting station without laying claim to the entire café. The same venue already hosted a support group of people helping each other find new jobs, so throwing my charity project into the mix Continue reading