Featured image not in the header?

I would like to post some head shots for teacher bios, but if I make them the “featured image”, OMG, it makes this huge blow up of the head shot the header image; it’s really not flattering at all.

The thing is though, the head shots look really nice in the page embed (WP 4.4+), so I really want to keep them as the featured image, but just not in the header. Embedding the bio pages on the general “teachers” page is easy and works well.

Is there a way to keep the featured image out of the header, either overall or on specific pagesd? I am using a child theme and tried to replace the bulan_custom_header function, but it didn’t work.

Thanks!