Speaker brand photography, past the single headshot.

The requests are always the same three things.

Horizontal, high resolution, and something that is not only your face. That is the shortlist, and it turns up in nearly every email an event sends before your name goes on anything. A program is landscape. A stage screen is landscape. A website hero is landscape. Your headshot is not, and cropping it wide leaves a strip of forehead and a lot of explaining.

Then comes the one-sheet, which is a sales document dressed as a flyer. It needs a portrait, a wider image with space beside you for your topics, and ideally a frame with some motion in it, so the page suggests a person who is interesting to watch rather than a person who owns a jacket.

This page is about that whole set. If the only gap right now is the portrait itself, headshots for speakers covers that sitting and nothing here replaces it.

The shapes an event will ask you for.

Speakers get caught out by geometry more than anything else. Here is the list I plan a sitting around, and it is worth holding your current folder up against it.

• A horizontal frame with clean space beside you, for a website hero and a title slide
• A full-length or three-quarter frame, which programs and posters use far more often than people expect
• A square that still reads at thumbnail size, for the session grid and the announcement post
• A vertical frame for a story, a poster or a lobby screen
• At least one frame with visible energy, so the page is not a passport photo with a topic list underneath it
• Files large enough to print, because a program goes to a printer and a web-sized file falls apart there

Wardrobe belongs on the same list, because a stage screen and a printed program punish different things. Fine stripes and tight checks can shimmer when a frame is thrown up large, and they turn muddy when a program goes to a printer. Solid colors and simple shapes survive both. My guide on what to wear covers the rest of it. And if you would rather not do your own hair and makeup that day, I work with several professional stylists who can be arranged beforehand, for an added fee.

A sitting that plans for those crops delivers them. One that does not leaves you dragging a portrait into a shape it was never framed for, usually the night before a program goes to print.

The energy of a talk, in one frame.

The hard part of speaker imagery is that the thing you are selling is motion. Timing, hands, the moment you lean in. A still photograph has to imply all of it, and a straight-on portrait almost never does. So we shoot for it deliberately: gesture, weight on one foot, a turn of the head, an expression caught mid-thought rather than held for a count of three. Energy is a specific thing to photograph, and it does not arrive because somebody told you to look excited. It arrives because the frame was set up so that something real is happening in your face.

That is direction, not acting. I will not ask you to pretend you are speaking, because pretending photographs badly and everyone can tell. I set the body, call the small adjustments, and take the frames in the gaps where you are genuinely reacting. My guide on how to pose goes through the mechanics if you want to know what the cues sound like before you arrive.

It is worth saying plainly that all of this happens in the studio. There is no shot of you on a stage here, and I would not fake one. What the studio gives instead is control: light that flatters, a background that will not fight a designer, and enough time to keep going until a frame carries the energy your talk does.

A one-sheet that finally has the images.

Most one-sheets are text with a photograph apologizing in the corner. A planned set changes the document, because the designer suddenly has something to build with: a strong vertical for the top, a horizontal with room for your topics, a working frame further down, a small square for the contact block. The page starts looking like it belongs to somebody worth booking.

The same files go straight into everywhere else a booking needs them. The bureau profile. The event website. The announcement post. The slide your host puts up while introducing you. You stop editing pictures under time pressure, which is the real return on planning any of this. It also means an organizer never has to chase you, and the speaker who answers a file request in a single reply is the one who is easy to work with.

Everything happens in my private North Naples studio, a turn off Pine Ridge Road. Speakers come in for it from Bonita Springs, Estero, Fort Myers, Marco Island and elsewhere in Southwest Florida. If it is the general shape of a brand sitting you are after, my guide to personal brand photography walks through it, and if speaking is one part of a wider business, the page for entrepreneurs plans the set around all of it.