AlixPartners
Brunswick Group
Edwin Coe
Munich Re
A few weeks ago, we started working for a global insurance company, a brand new Piranha client. Our brief was to take headshots of around 250 of its 1500 employees based at the client’s new UK head office in the heart of the City of London’s insurance district.
The client views being under one roof as good for business and chose to bring together staff from its smaller London offices to its new head office. It sees uniting under a single location as a great opportunity to build esprit de corps.
Many of our large clients have rolling programmes of inductions for new joiners which incorporate photo sessions among a series of other getting-to-know the firm activities on the same days.
As well as photographing new joiners we are also taking fresh headshots of existing employees for their profiles on the company’s intranet and other marketing platforms.
With a large shoot spread over several months, our challenge is to deliver absolutely uniform sets of headshots all with a consistent look and feel. This includes technical challenges such as changing external light conditions that come as autumn turns into winter.
We start with a recce of the offices
Before we started photographing the staff, we had a recce of the rooms in the new London office where we would be shooting.
We are using two photographers for these corporate photoshoots to speed up throughput. During our recce we found out we would be working on different floors which requires us to set up our lighting, camera settings and backgrounds accordingly.
To achieve the uniformity the client requires for consistent brand presentation, we take great care fixing colour balance in advance, including adjusting the manual settings on the cameras as well as flash softboxes. It’s a small job but saves us lots of post-shoot processing time because tweaks in post-production can be applied to all the sets of pictures at once rather than carrying out each change individually.
Again, during the recce and our briefing with the marketing and comms team, we agreed the poses and facial expressions we would need from each staff member. To reassure the client, we took trial photographs with some of the marketing and communications staff so that they felt confident we would meet their brief.
Ultimately, the point I am making here is about the importance of good preparation when aiming for consistency of images for photoshoots over longer periods.
Pictures for LinkedIn and personal social media use
During the briefing meeting we agreed that we would be given time during each person’s photoshoot to take some casual images, where requested, for staff who wanted photos for LinkedIn and personal use on their social media channels.
Before the photoshoot, we let each person being photographed know that we are happy to choose which photos from the set would be best for their LinkedIn and other profiles. This goes down very well with the subjects, generating pre-shoot goodwill which helps maintain motivation levels during the session.
Motivation is as important as technical consistency
It helps to remember that each person is going before the camera for the very first time. Some might be reluctant and might need warming up or gently distracting if nervous. This is an interesting challenge because every single subject is different, and generally everyone needs a little help to become comfortable and behave naturally in front the camera, including senior managers and board directors!
Enjoying our work and meeting new people helps enormously in staying motivated. Some human interaction and a little assistance with posture ensures each subject will be looking their best and is more than likely to be happy with the resulting photographs.
Post production
Finally, consistency of image presentation is also achieved in post-production. Any anomalies that weren’t eliminated during the camera and lighting set ups can be tackled using specialist software, for example we can tidy up stray hairs, temporary skin blemishes or other imperfections that might have crept into a picture, as well as fine-tune colour balance if required.
Headshot training video
You can see why corporate and business photography is all about consistency, which is why our team holds regular training days to ensure everyone is always working to the same brand standards.
Please check out our short video of a training day held recently in London.
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Professional corporate photographer, providing company headshot photography and video for businesses in London, the rest of the UK and Europe. Piranha are commissioned by FTSE100 companies and start-ups alike, for numerous projects, covering a wide range of work and styles. Portraits and office photography for use on websites, events coverage and PR shots for press and publications, as well as Board and location photography for annual reports. Using top of the range Leica cameras and lenses. We process the images promptly and to an extremely high standard.