Professional photos have become hugely common in the United Stats, from professional corporate headshots to professional portraits. The art of photography is becoming more recognized and praised than ever before, and photography, though not always professional photography, is becoming a very respected skill to have. Many people take up photography as a hobby, and will shoot everything from their family and friends to interesting sites around them, sometimes even in their own backyard. Casual photography is also common, and people post thousand upon thousands of pictures to social media sites each and every day not only in the United States but in many other places around the world as well.
Posting photographs to social media sites is an incredibly common practice, from pictures of a much enjoyed meal to pictures of your kids or even pictures of fun experiences that you’ve had with friends. You might even choose to share the professional photos that you’ve had taken, such as wedding photos or professional photos of your kids, which are common among the current generation embarking on the journey and adventure of parenting. But no matter what kind of photos you take, it’s likely that you’ll share at least some of them at some point or another. In fact, data shows that around seven hundred and thirty billion photos are shared every year on the social media platform of Facebook alone, from pictures shared on private profiles to the pictures that are shared in public groups. Instagram, another popular social media site, also gathers an immense amount of photos over the course of just one year, collecting as many as twenty two billion shared images in the same span of time, far less than what is posted to Facebook but an incredibly impressive number in its own right.
But professional photos can be used for a number of other purposes as well, such as in the case of having professional headshots for work taken. This has become particularly important since the advent and widespread use of the platform LinkedIn, which can be an incredibly powerful tool to have at your disposal when you are in the process of searching for a job, particularly if your LinkedIn profile page is a strong one. And part of having a strong linked in profile is, of course, having a strong profile picture. This profile picture will be an important first impression for many potential employers and as as much as ninety percent of a first impression are based on competence and trustworthiness alone, your professional headshot needs to convey both qualities in spade. Having professional photos taken to use as your headshot is a good idea, particularly for a platform like LinkedIn, where data has shown that the LinkedIn profiles that included pictures were able to get as many as forty times the responses as well as eleven times the number of views than LinkedIn profiles without any type of picture were able to garner. This, of course, shows just how important professional photos can be.
Professional photos can also be a great way to simply commemorate important moments in your life. For this reason, professional photographers are typically hired when a wedding is planned in order to take the professional photos that will best help the happy couple and all of their friends and their family to remember the wedding event as best as they can and in the highest quality possible. A professional photographer might also be used to take pictures of newborn babies, as a way to showcase their cuteness and even to announce their birth. And on top of this, many parents have annual professional photos taken of their child to best help to commemorate their growth and look back over (sometimes very nostalgically) as the years pass on.
Photographs, and especially professional photographs, are important and have a number of important applications, such as everything from charting your child’s growth over time to making a good impression on potential employer. Making a good first impression is key, and is something that shouldn’t be underestimated.