Headshots

I want to give a hearty thank you to Malinda Hartong for a fantastic series of headshots from a recent session. These are the first headshots I’ve taken in a studio; she was patient, accommodating, and instructive.

We had good chatter throughout the session, and relaxing and getting into a rhythm was easy. I intend to get more photo work done by Malinda, and I highly recommend her to anyone seeking headshots.

I first met Malinda and her husband, Glenn, when I worked at The Apple Store Kenwood here in Cincinnati. They were frequent visitors and friendly with most of us. So, it should come as little surprise that when I decided headshots would be valuable for the back material of a novel I'm drafting and my nascent voice-acting efforts, Malinda came top of mind even after twenty-odd years.

Across multiple outfit changes and backdrops, we had some chats about mutual friends from over the years. We had a brief catch-up with Glenn, who took a few minutes to chat about recent trips to India for a documentary project he worked on.

The shot selection process was nice and easy. She marked ones she knew wouldn't make the cut; then, we collaborated on the others to get it down to a dozen or so shots we both liked.

In post-production, she did some simple touches and sent me the results, and I am simply ecstatic with them.

You might think, "Why didn't he go for some AI headshots? Isn't he an AI guy?" And, in truth, I considered it.

I have tinkered with AI headshots and other images for myself using MidJourney, Flux, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion, but I've never been satisfied with the results.

Perhaps I didn't engineer my prompts well enough, or maybe the source material (photos) I provided wasn't good enough. Possibly, AI can't capture the essence of my look for some reason.

You can see some of Malinda and Glen's work on their website. They also frequently post on several social accounts, but I'm mostly connected with them on Instagram and LinkedIn.