Press Photos for an EPK: Shot List, Specs, and Common Mistakes

You can write a great bio and still lose a booking because the top of your page is a dark phone photo. Images are the fastest signal of how seriously you take your own work — and unlike a lot of career advice, this one is genuinely fixable in an afternoon.

The four photos you actually need

1. The hero. Landscape, 16:9 or wider, because it has to fill the top of a page on desktop and crop sanely on a phone. For DJs and live acts this is almost always a real venue shot. For photographers it's one signature frame from your strongest work.
2. The portrait. Vertical or square, well lit, one subject, uncluttered background. This is the photo a publication runs when they cover you. Get it taken by someone who does this for a living.
3. The action shot. You doing the actual job — behind the decks, mid-set, shooting a ceremony. It's the proof-of-life image.
4. The room. Often not you at all: the crowd, the stage, the venue. Bookers use this to gauge the scale you've worked at.

If you have those four, you're done. A fifth photo only helps if it's as strong as the first four; otherwise it lowers the average.

Specs that matter

• Resolution: keep originals at 2400px or more on the long edge. Print press needs roughly 300 DPI, which means a much bigger file than the one you display.
• Format: JPEG for photographs. PNG only when you need transparency, like a cutout used as a design element — PNG photos are needlessly heavy.
• Color profile: export sRGB. Wide-gamut profiles such as Adobe RGB shift color in most browsers, usually toward flat and dull.
• Weight: aim under ~500KB per displayed image. Squoosh or ImageOptim handle this in one drag.
• Consistency: pick one aspect ratio per gallery. Mixed ratios read as unfinished even when every photo is good.
• Filenames: fraze-kremwerk-2026-01.jpg, not IMG_4821.jpg. Editors thank you, and search engines read them.

Lighting and framing, briefly

• Club light is colored and moving. Ask your photographer to shoot when the wash is on your face rather than behind you, and to favor a fast lens over flash.
• Leave headroom in the hero. Titles and gradients will sit over it, so a tightly cropped face gets ruined by layout.
• Shoot both a vertical and a horizontal of every important frame. Every platform crops differently.
• Neutral color grading ages far better than a heavy look. Trends in editing date a photo within a year.

Mistakes that read as amateur

• Selfies. An arm's-length phone shot signals that nobody was there to photograph you.
• Watermarks. They make the file useless for press and make the page look anxious.
• Screenshots of social posts. Double compression, wrong size, visible UI. Always go back to the source file.
• Everything from one night. Six frames from the same gig reads like the only gig.
• Group shots as the portrait. If a booker can't tell which person you are, the photo is doing damage.
• Uncredited photos. Credit the photographer. It's the right thing to do and it's how you keep getting shot for free.

The shot list to hand your photographer

If you're booking a shoot specifically for a press kit, send this ahead of time:

• Wide horizontal establishing shot with headroom, for the hero
• Three portrait variations: neutral, warm, mid-laugh
• Two action shots — doing the work, not posing at it
• One detail shot: hands on equipment, camera in hand, mic in hand
• One environmental frame: you small inside a big space

That's a two-hour shoot, and it should carry your page for a year.

If you don't have good photos yet

Publish anyway with the three best images you have, and put the strongest one at the top. Then fix it deliberately: ask the next venue you play whether their house photographer will share frames, trade a set for a shoot with a photographer building a portfolio, or split the cost of a shoot with another artist on the same bill. A page with three strong photos beats one padded with twenty weak ones every single time.

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