Head-and-shoulders framing crops a photo just below the collarbone, showing the face, neck, and top of the shoulders while cutting off everything below. It is the standard crop for a headshot, because it keeps the face large enough to read clearly at small sizes without wasting frame on details a viewer does not need.
Why this specific crop and not something looser
A half-body or full-body crop leaves the face small relative to the frame, which is fine on a large screen but fails at the sizes headshots actually get viewed at — a circular profile icon, a directory thumbnail, a name badge. Head-and-shoulders framing exists to solve that specific problem: maximize face size while leaving enough context that the photo does not feel like a mugshot crop.
It gets tighter for smaller formats
A commonly recommended convention for a LinkedIn photo is for the face to fill roughly 60% of the frame; the LinkedIn photo guide covers how framing plays out at that platform's thumbnail size. A 1x1 ID photo crops even tighter than that, because a square, one-inch print leaves almost no room for shoulders at all.
The most common framing mistake
Shooting too far back and cropping in later loses resolution and often clips the top of the head or leaves an odd amount of empty space above it. It is easier to frame close to correct at capture time than to rescue a loose shot afterward. Camera distance and lens length also change how a face looks, and focal length across Pixshop's photo looks measures which lens lengths its own recipes use.
Keeping framing consistent across a team
Head-and-shoulders framing is also the easiest convention to standardize across a group, which is exactly the brief in photographing a fully remote team — one framing rule applied to everyone produces a matching set, whatever each person's original photo looked like.