Today I wrote a haiku to hair:Hair, you are so strange
one day you look so lovely
the next, oh so lame.
When preparing for a headshot portrait session a lot of us make a laundry list of all the things we hope look okay. We hope our shirt isn't wrinkled or that we brushed all of our dog's hairs off it. We hope our eyeshadow isn't creasing or our mascara isn't mysteriously flaking off and leaving little black snowflakes on our cheeks. We hope we remembered to trim that one little nose hair that always sticks out of that left nostril...
On top of that list is almost always our hair. Oh, hair. That pile of filamentous biomaterial emanating from the dermis of our scalp which causes us so much heartache. We wash it, dry it, spray it, curl it, flatten it, tease it, dye it, and otherwise attempt to torture it into the shape we want it to take. And it usually resists.
So what do you do when your hair isn't doing what you want it to do for the one hour you want it to look perfect (during a photo session)? You get a photographer who understands your pain and looks out for your hair- making sure it's not covering your face, sticking up like Alfalfa's hair, or being otherwise totally disobedient.
And then you chill out! Smile through your crazy hair because when someone looks at your headshot they shouldn't even be looking at your hair anyway- they should be looking at your friendly, approachable personality radiating from your smile and drawing attention from everything else in the photo to your smiling eyes.. Unless you have hair like the B-52's. Then people will notice your hair before your face.
