The reflex when a profile photograph disappoints is to take another one. That is usually the most expensive route to a five-minute problem.
What is actually wrong, most of the time
The crop. Everything below the collarbone is wasted area at the size these images are displayed, and a head occupying a quarter of the frame simply stops being identifiable.
Correcting it needs no camera, no session and no money. It is worth exhausting before considering anything else, and it resolves roughly half of all cases.
The second most common finding
The background. Dark hair against a dark wall gives a silhouette with no face in it once scaled down — invisible at full size, total in a list. The fix is not white but separation from your hair colour.
The third
Light direction. Strong side light is flattering at full size and turns half the face into a grey area when scaled down. Flatter and more frontal is duller in large and much more legible in small.
None of the three depends on the camera, which is why buying a better one does not help.
The brief for this destination
The core requirements come down to those three, and the professional version covers the conventions, which are narrower than for portraits generally.
Taking it yourself is entirely feasible. The error to avoid is distance: at arm's length perspective enlarges your nose, and two metres back with zoom removes the effect completely.
What the photograph can claim
Less than the marketing says and more than sceptics allow. It adds no competence. It prevents someone briefly willing to look from scrolling past — a modest claim and a defensible one.
Reading further
The collected material on this network covers the rest.
The one-minute test
Scale your image down to the size it is actually displayed at and set it beside the original. If you cannot tell where your head ends, that is the version almost everyone sees.
Almost nobody runs this test, and it is the only one that reproduces the real viewing conditions.
