Written by the BetterPic team. Disclosure: we sell generated headshots, which cannot do this — that is the point of the last section.
Outdoor headshots are cheaper, faster and often better than studio ones, and they fail for one reason: people shoot them at the wrong time of day and blame the location.
Overcast, any time. The best light there is. Cloud is a softbox the size of the sky. No hard shadows, no squinting, even illumination across the face. Photographers describe overcast as a consolation and it is the opposite: it is the condition studios spend thousands imitating.
The hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset. Warm, low, directional. Flattering and atmospheric, and the reason every guide mentions it. The catch is that it lasts an hour and moves fast, so you get one attempt.
Open shade, midday. Not under a tree — dappled light through leaves is the worst of both worlds. Under an awning, in a doorway, on the shaded side of a building, with open sky in front of you. This is the most reliable option because it is available all day.
Direct midday sun. The worst light available. Overhead sun puts hard shadows in the eye sockets and under the nose, and makes people squint. Nothing about a location rescues this.
Put real distance between yourself and whatever is behind you. Ten metres or more if you can.
Distance is what produces the soft background that makes a photograph look professional, and it does it optically rather than through a filter. Standing against a wall gives you a wall; standing ten metres in front of it gives you a suggestion of one.
It also solves the failure that kills profile pictures: if the background is far enough away and out of focus, your head has a clean outline against it, which is what you need at small sizes.
Anything with strong lines behind your head — poles, railings, door frames. At a glance they appear to be attached to you. Bright patches in the background, which pull the eye. And any light bouncing off a coloured surface onto your face, which is why photographing beside a red brick wall is a bad idea.
Context. An environmental headshot — you, in the place you work, with that place legible behind you — says something a plain backdrop cannot. It suits people whose location is part of what they do: architects, chefs, trades, anyone with a workshop.
It also dates faster and it is harder to match across a team, which is why company pages default to plain backgrounds.
Worth saying plainly, since we sell one. Generated headshots produce studio-style output against synthesised backgrounds. They are good at the conventional professional portrait and they cannot put you in a specific real place, because they were not there.
If the location is the point, a camera and an overcast afternoon beat anything we make. If the location is irrelevant and you need something consistent and quick, that is where the generated route earns its place, and the background options are studio-style by design.
For cropping and tidying the frames afterwards, the free profile picture editor.