Last month I was invited by Becs Bate, Social Media Executive, to join her in one of her Monday livestreams to reveal ‘What Makes A Great LinkedIn Profile Picture’. This took me out of my comfort zone; it’s a common myth that photographers are comfortable on the other side of the lens – I’m like you, I notice things that others don’t – in this instance I realised that I wriggle about way too much. But it was a great experience, it does me good to put myself in the shoes of those who choose me to take [...]

Apparently it’s Israel Israel came bottom in a list of 25 countries with a score of 66.39%. Chile came top with a score of 69.88%. But we can’t be too smug in the UK; we came in at 22nd on the list. The report was put together by photography portal, Snappr, which analysed facial expressions, smiles, cropping, backgrounds, editing, use of colour amongst other things. And guess what? The smile analyser marks you down if you don’t use a neutral background AND if you don’t show your teeth! This really struck a chord with me because so many of [...]

Or, is that really how good I look? I was reading Donald Miller’s excellent book recently, ‘Building A Story Brand’. In it he refers to a famous marketing campaign for Dove soap. The concept of the campaign is that other people see a beauty in us which we don’t see ourselves. The campaign was launched in the US in 2013 and featured the work of a FBI trained forensic artist. Several women sat where he couldn’t see them and they were asked to describe themselves to him whilst he sketched what they told him. He did [...]