I volunteered to shoot headshots of my coworkers a few weeks ago. Having never actually done such a thing, I realized that I’d better learn how. So, I watched a couple of YouTube videos, bought an inexpensive studio flash and umbrella, and set it up in our office hallway, where the Venetian plaster walls seemed like as good a photographic backdrop as any.

So, here are the results. I’ll admit that they certainly exceeded my expectations! It helps that I have such gorgeous coworkers. Check out these fabulous faces!

My workflow was a breeze, thanks to Lightroom and Jeffrey Friedl’s excellent plugin. I suppose I really should make a video describing the workflow, but in a nutshell, it went like this.

1. Import the shots to Lightroom
2. Select the keepers by tagging them with the ~ (tilde) key.
3. Filter on tagged images
4. Select them all, make Virtual Copies
5. To make smaller, uniform, square headshots, crop all of the copies at once with Auto Sync enabled
6. Turn Auto Sync off, alternate between the Compare (N key) and Crop (R key) views to make the size uniform and line up the eyes
7. Copy everything to a new folder in Jeffrey’s Picasa Web Publish Service
8. Click Publish
9. Bask in the accolades