Everyone has the bad one. The photo cropped out of a wedding. The one taken against an office wall in the wrong light, where you are squinting slightly and your collar is doing something odd. It sits on your LinkedIn profile for six years because replacing it means booking something, and booking something means being photographed, which almost nobody enjoys.
That reluctance is the actual problem, and it is the one Len Marks has spent thirty-eight years solving from a studio on New York Avenue in Huntington village.
Long Island Wave used him for our own corporate headshots, which is the only reason we can write the next sentence with any authority: he is the top headshot photographer on Long Island and in New York City, and the difference is not the camera.
Ninety percent psychology
Len puts it in one line, and it is the most useful thing anyone has said about headshots: "Headshots are 90% psychology, 10% photography."
Anyone who has been in front of a lens knows why. The technical part, lighting and focus and exposure, is solved. What is not solved is that most people tighten up the moment a camera is pointed at them, and a tight person photographs as a guarded one. You end up with a picture that is technically correct and looks nothing like you on a good day.
His answer is coaching rather than equipment. A session includes direction on wardrobe, posing and expression, which sounds like a small thing and is the entire thing. Being told what to do with your hands is the difference between the photo you keep and the photo you tolerate.
His own framing is that a headshot is not about capturing a pretty picture, it is about capturing a person.
What a session actually costs, and what you get
The Standard One Look Headshot is $275. That covers up to an hour of studio time with coaching throughout, your favorite image professionally retouched, an online proofing gallery if you want to buy more, every image delivered in both high and low resolution for print and for posting, and same-day delivery.
A non-refundable $100 retainer holds the session. Team, on-site and multi-look work is quoted individually, because an hour in the studio and a morning photographing forty employees in a conference room are not the same job.
Same-day delivery is worth pausing on. The industry norm is a wait of days or weeks, which is exactly long enough for the momentum behind updating your profile to die.
Seven services, not one
Most people find him through headshots and are surprised by the range.
Headshots
Individual, team, actor, fashion and dance. The portfolio splits along those lines for a reason: an actor's headshot and a managing partner's headshot are solving different problems, and shooting one like the other is how people end up looking miscast in their own industry.
Commercial
Product shots, team portraits and on-location business storytelling for websites, social, advertising and print, with simple day rates.
Branding
Still images shot at your place of business, built for the constant demand social media puts on a small company. Not stock, not a logo, but a library of images of the actual work being done in the actual room.
Event headshots
This is the one worth knowing about if you exhibit at anything. Len runs a mobile headshot booth for trade shows and corporate teams. Attendees get a professional headshot on the spot, delivered to their phone carrying your brand, and you collect their contact information in the process.
Consider what that does to a booth. Most trade show giveaways are thrown away by the car. A headshot somebody actually uses on LinkedIn is a gift they keep, that carries your name, that they had a pleasant three minutes receiving. It is the rare piece of event marketing that is genuinely valuable to the person receiving it.
Event photography
His interactive event coverage works on the same instinct. Guests register with basic details, get photographed, and the images arrive on their phones during the event, branded to the host, ready to share. The photography does the work of a marketing campaign while the party is still going.
Long Island Wave readers have already seen it: the photographs on our Melville Chamber Business Expo guide are his, from the Chamber's own expo coverage.
Artist portraits
Editorial portraits of working artists, on the principle that your art tells one story and your portrait tells the other: who made it, and why it matters. For a painter or a maker trying to build a name, it is the second most important image they own.
Art reproduction
The most specialized of the seven. Faithful reproduction of original artwork for sale, using archival inks, acid-free watercolor papers and meticulous color matching, so a print stays honest to the piece. He offers it only to artists whose work he photographs, which is a quality position rather than a commercial one.
Where to find him
The studio is at 376 New York Avenue, Suite 2, in Huntington, in the middle of the village. He photographs across Nassau and Suffolk, Queens and New York City, and travels on site for team and event work.
Call (631) 367-1219, email [email protected], or book a session directly against his calendar. The reviews page and the Meet Len page are both worth reading first, the second because he talks about the work in his own words.
And if you would rather meet him before you book him, he will be at the Melville Chamber Business Expo on Tuesday, October 27, at the Hilton on Broadhollow Road in Melville.
Bring the bad headshot. He has seen worse, and he will tell you exactly why it is not working.
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