Corporate headshots and team photography that do not look like stock

The team page and the LinkedIn profile are where a prospect checks who they would actually be dealing with. The photographs there do a lot of work, and most of them were taken by a colleague against an office wall.

Consistency across the whole company

The problem is rarely one bad headshot. It is fifty headshots taken over five years by different people in different light. We set one lighting scheme, one background, one crop and one colour treatment, document it, and reuse it for every new hire. A company of a hundred then looks like one organisation rather than a collection of profile pictures.

The setup

A portable background and two or three lights, set up in a meeting room first thing in the morning. Each person takes about five minutes: a short conversation to relax the face, a dozen frames, a look at the back of the camera together. Everyone is shot at the same distance and focal length — around 85 mm equivalent — so no face is distorted and the crops match.

Direction, not posing

People stiffen when told to pose. They look like themselves when they are talking. The direction is about where to stand and where to look, and the shutter goes while the conversation is still happening. The stock-photo smile is edited out at the selection stage, never asked for.

Beyond the headshot

A few environmental portraits in the actual workspace, some working shots, and one group photograph that will be used for years, so it is worth the fifteen minutes of wrangling. Group photographs are shot from a tripod across several frames, so a closed eye in one can be fixed from another.

Delivery

Each person gets a web crop, a square for LinkedIn and a high-resolution file, named by their name. The company gets the lighting sheet and a folder structure that new hires drop into. Retouching is limited to what a good night's sleep would fix — blemishes and stray hairs, never the shape of a face.