Your picture on CS needs to attract people (part A

Your picture on CS needs to attract people and how you do that is paramount to driving the right people to you.
But there are impediments of which the iPhone (my picture was taken with my iPhone) is one, as it’s not a portrait camera. However, all professional photographers attest to one thing, which is to complete understand what is called “the medium” – the camera & the lens being used. If there are bad pictures it’s mostly because of “difficulty with the medium”. Understand the best your camera can do is vital. Therefore, trying to “create” a striking portrait needs for you or the photographer to use the right equipment.
A portrait is about you, your face and may be what you are all about. Sitting on your bed with your computer, cooking, in your garden, in your workshop, at a gallery, a restaurant, outside the entrance to the cinema or opera or just you in your work clothes doing what you enjoy the most. Whatever you do make sure that whatever is in the picture is connected to you – and by that I mean don’t have things that are distracting or detract from what you are producing.
Note the size of the space CS provides is small and if you divided the area up into nine you need to fill about half (4.5 spaces out of nine) to get a good start. Therefore, it’s no good having you appearing in one space (1/9) is proportionally too small and that (unfortunately) forces you into having the camera much closer.
Your portrait is an opportunity for people to look “into your soul”. After all, you are attempting to sell yourself. It’s not as effective to construct a candid image, blurred image, artistic (arty farty) image as that creates detractions and perhaps reduces your potential impact. Happy snaps are okay if they don’t have something growing out of your head, heavy shadows, reflections off a window, and distortions of your face created by wide-angle lenses, and so on. Don’t be satisfied with an image that you know makes you look bad.
Position of you face in the camera frame so that you have more of a close up. If you for some reason that is not an option then step back and take but make sure you crop the image and that way you still have a close up. Artistic images can include just the outline your profile or include your head and shoulder pose but this is not about art but closeness that shows who you are, therefore, that I’d avoid.
Be yourself and when you pose make sure that you have practiced that and that you feel comfortable with what you see. Through years of practice, celebrities know how pose and have photographers manufacture a look. You need to do that in a mirror.