I bought a camera because nobody would take my picture properly.

It started with an acting job

In 2007 I needed a headshot. I was acting, the headshot was the whole audition before the audition, and I could not find a photographer in Chicago whose work met the standard I had in my head. Not a snobbery thing. I just kept looking at proofs and thinking, that is not what I look like when I am good.

So I bought a camera and worked it out myself.

The first clients were other actors, because actors talk and because I understood exactly what they were afraid of. You are not buying a photograph. You are buying the version of yourself that gets picked out of a stack of four hundred.

Then social media happened to everyone

Around 2010 the same problem arrived for people who had never thought about it. Suddenly a lawyer had a profile photo. A doctor had a profile photo. Everyone had a face on the internet whether they had planned one or not, and most of them hated it.

That is when the studio stopped being an actor business and started being a professional one. Same fear underneath. Different clothes.

The Natural Shot Method

The hard part of a headshot is never the camera. It is that most people freeze the second a lens points at them, and a frozen person photographs like a stranger.

So I built a system for it. I called it the Natural Shot Method, and it is the reason the studio could promise every single client a usable image rather than hoping for a good day. I described it publicly for the first time in a 2018 interview with Voyage Chicago as "a system I created, to ensure every client will take their best image".

I have since taught it to other photographers. It is the thing I am proudest of building, because it is the part that scales past me.

Fulton Market, and the number that mattered

The studio settled in Fulton Market on Chicago's west side. Over seventeen years it became one of the top ten rated headshot studios in the United States, and the top rated headshot photography in Chicago on both Yelp and Google.

That second one is the part that changed how I think.

Being top rated was not a vanity metric. It was the entire lead engine. People found the studio because it ranked, and they booked the studio because the reviews said they could. I was not out-marketing anyone. I was just easier to find and easier to trust than the alternative, and that turned out to be worth more than being the best photographer in the room.

By 2024 I had photographed around fifteen thousand professionals and captured over three million images.

Los Angeles, and a detour that taught me the same lesson

Between 2019 and 2020 I helped scale a coaching brand in Los Angeles from roughly two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to around nine hundred thousand.

Different industry, no cameras, same mechanic. The offer was already good before I got there. What it did not have was a reason for the right people to find it and believe it quickly.

Fort Myers, from zero

In 2024 I moved the operation to Southwest Florida and opened a headshots-only studio in the McGregor and River District corridor of Fort Myers.

This part was useful in a way I did not expect. I had spent seventeen years building a reputation in a city where people already knew my name, and then I landed somewhere nobody did. No referrals. No history. A brand new listing in a market that already had photographers in it.

So I ran my own playbook on my own studio and watched what happened. It worked, and quickly. That result is what convinced me the process was a product and not just something I happened to be good at.

Which is how I ended up running three companies

I am not behind the camera every day anymore. I build the companies that do the work.

Spearleaf does the visibility half. Local SEO and AI search for service businesses, so they turn up in the map pack and inside the answers people now get from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity.

The Reputation does the trust half. It removes unfair Google reviews on a pay-on-result basis, five hundred dollars if it comes down and nothing at all if it does not. I built it because I spent years with one unfair one-star review sitting on a studio I had poured my life into, and I know exactly which review you are looking at right now.

JA Headshots is the original craft, still running, still photographing professionals across Southwest Florida.

Three companies, one job. Help good businesses get found, and help them stay worth finding.

Where I am

Fort Myers, Florida. Six businesses built since 2007. Still convinced that the most underrated advantage in any market is simply being the one people can find.