Click here to enter the 2010 Blog Salad Web Design Giveaway Contest! Deadline to enter is 31 May 2010.
Oh, Lord have mercy. It’s time I change my headshot.
Around the internet, I am predominantly known by two photos:
The one on the left is from a San Antonio mission in December 2004 and has the contrast and brightness intentionally over-exposing the photo. The one on the right is from my patio in January 2009 and has wicked shadows casting across my face—and my wife says I look too serious.
These headshots are important—thanks to Gravatar and Twitter, they follow me everywhere I go, on every tweet and almost every blog comment I make. If they look bad, I look bad. These photos aren’t terrible, but I’m due for something a little better.
Anyhow, it’s time for an upgrade. While attending the 2010 ASJA conference in New York, I stayed with my dear friend Margot for two days, then two days with her brother, Ian Roberts, who is a fashion photographer, and his three other wonderfully Bohemian roommates. Ian and company live in this big, funky loft (which was featured on the cover of the New York Times Real Estate section) in Bushwick, a former industrial district in Brooklyn. Since Ian’s photo lighting and cameras are strewn about, I couldn’t help but hire him to do a photo shoot.
Before we started, Ian showed me samples of photos he took for his roommate, an actor that will be playing alongside Al Pacino this summer at NYC’s Shakespeare in the Park. I said, “They look awesome!” Let’s do it.
Did I mention his roommate is totally gorgeous? He’s the sort of guy who can pull off a pink-striped tank top and a blue blazer with gold buttons. I, on the other hand, well, not so much.
We went through four wardrobe changes and took over 600 photos in about an hour. Finally, near the end, I started to loosen up, but only a little:
And, well, I had to go back to Denver eventually, so we stopped there.
So, now, in perhaps what will be the most painful yet important part of this crowdsourcing design project, I’m asking all of you to help me choose my headshot. This photo will be used in my features for Complete Woman Magazine, my Psychology Today blog, Gravatar, Twitter, Foursquare, my personal portfolio site, LinkedIn, the About page here on Blog Salad, and probably ten other places I can’t remember right now.
With the assistance of my wife, I’ve narrowed the choices down to three options:
Option 1 - Avatar Square
Option 1 - Profile Crop
Option 2 - Avatar Square
Option 2 - Profile Crop
Option 3 - Avatar Square
Option 3 - Profile Crop
So, there you go. I’m totally cringing as you read this. Here’s the poll:
Totally love the profile photo. It makes me think you’re about to say something really important. The video is hilarious and too bad you can’t post that on all your avatars. Fun post.
It cracks me up that you are letting us decide this, Ron–and I agree with Jackie. How cool would that be if you could use the video as the avatar.
They are ALL good–you got a great photog. there.
Great photos! I had to watch your YouTube video 3 (okay 4) time because I kind of got hooked on the music
~Meredith
Meredith: It’s a great song, right? That’s courtesy of YouTube’s Audioswap feature that sets your video to the royalty-free music of your choosing.
Here’s a little useless trivia: In these photos, I’m sitting in front of a giant, upside-down B&W print of Manhattan. The song? Mumble Blues by “Manhattan” Paul Bascomb.
It’s like I do this stuff on purpose!
Nice photos. I’m with the others, a video avatar would be so cool.
I have been waiting several days for something fantastic to happen to the look of the blog. One day I tuned in to find it rather odd looking, and thought there would be a poll at the end that would fix it up in coming days.
I waited patiently, and never saw any action towards changing the odd look, and today I was trying to figure out why in the world you were planning to use an amusement park mirror looking photo for a new head shot. Light bulb moment! I had downloaded Google’s Chrome browser and had been enjoying it. Trust me, on my computer, Blog Salad is really tossed in Chrome! LOL
It’s not just your computer, Kristie—the site really was a mess in Chrome and Safari. A BIG MESS. Why? Because I added “height: 100%;” to the code instead of “100px” in one place.
Anyhow, because you and Barb Freda alerted me, I’ve been alerted to the issue, fixed it, and am tweaking a few other things that you probably hadn’t seen before… thanks!
Everybody, video avatars are possible on Twitter and a few other places, but they’re like the flashing neon of the internet—a sure sign that you’re trashy.
I went back and forth between Options 1 and 3; I like them both.
By the way, not sure if this was just your sublime humor at play or a typo, but the line about being ready for your close-up refers to Mr. DeMille, not Deville. The latter, if memory serves me right, is a Cadillac.
Nope, that’s a typo. But, unlike those that Barb Freda has graciously been pointing out to me (it’s salmagundi, not salgamundi) this one was intentional.
I’m tinkering with a tactic to encourage comments (BikeSnobNYC intentionally misspells Friday to prod new visitors into commenting or contacting him).
So far, you’re the only cinephile fish to bite! And by telling you, I’ve sort of let the cat, er, Cadillac out of the bag.
Glad your site is back. I thought you were putting us through some kind of weird challenge over the past few days. Yesterday I voted for the video, but today changed to option 3, profile crop.
Who are you looking at in that sidelong glance one? You look like a pretty girl just walked by and you turned away from the camera.