These are headshots for a corporate financial group I had the pleasure of photographing in downtown Vancouver this past month. When I was first contacted about the headshot session, we were unsure exactly where we would be taking the photos. All I knew was that that wanted to use their office environment in their background – something of a mix between an environmental portrait and a corporate headshot.
When I visited their office, the biggest location we could identify was their boardroom. Lucky for me, the boardroom faces north, which makes it a little easier to control for sunlight on bright sunny days. At the same time, it also meant that the boardroom would need to be lit with flash, so the challenge was to determine exactly where the lights could go in the limited space I had.
There just happened to be enough space for the lighting setup I wanted. Three Elinchrom D-Lites lights with Rotalux softboxes and 2 reflectors were used to achieve the final headshot portraits. in their boardroom space. I was also asked to make each shot slightly different, so I used different angles to change the look of the background to include some of the chairs and different segments of the frosted glass wall behind while still keeping the lighting setup mostly the same.
The final photos were shot to about waist level, which is something I almost always do because it gives my clients the flexibility to crop their images to different sizes depending on the publication. If I shoot too tight, it limits their options for publishing headshots in different dimensions.
The team photo below is an example of another composite corporate group photo created in Adobe Photoshop CC from 7 separate digital business headshot portraits. These types of photo composites are great for company websites and print marketing when the option to add or remove people is needed. It was shot against a pure white background in studio for the specific purpose of maximizing flexibility in the future to modify the team size over time.
How often have you scheduled a corporate group photo only to have one or two people become unavailable for the photo session? Do you reschedule and hope to find another date and time that works for everyone? Composite team photos offer you flexibility in these types of situations. You can photograph everyone that is present, then add team members missing from the photo at a later date.
Composite team photo created from separate headshots taken at my Vancouver photo studio.
Composited group photos created using Adobe Photoshop offer a good way for business to add and remove people from their group or team photos. In the example below, 5 separate photos were put together to create what looks like a team photo (aka. faux group shot!). Since each person is on their own Photoshop layer, it is easy to add team members. Each person in the photo can also have their photo taken at different times – so if someone wasn’t able to make it to the photo shoot, no problem. They can be photographed separately and added later to produce a nice panorama shot for an “about us” page banner.
This is a set of group corporate headshots I did on location for a bank in Langley, BC. These headshot photos were all shot with studio strobes and softboxes against a light grey background set up in the staff room.
Small businesses can really benefit from headshot photos for their website. Good headshots can help create that personal connection between businesses and customers that is so critical to doing business in today’s hyper social media world. Establishing personal connections quickly have always been important for establishing trust, but in our connected world, where a customer can access numerous other business in minutes, it is more important than ever that a small business is able to show “who” they are.
Having a brand and “about us” page is helpful, but if you want your customers to really know who you are, it is good practice to show who the actual people are behind the business. Customers see logos and mission statements all the time, but what really separates a small business from another are people who represent the company. This is why presenting good headshots of a company’s staff is so important for business.
A local well-known business recently contacted us to help them produce a set of photos for their staff. The company has a history as a family business and displaying photos of their local business operators has been an important part of their marketing for some time. Since opening a new funeral home in the Dunbar neighbourhood of Vancouver, Martin Brothers has been investing in their marketing to local families in B.C. As part of their online marketing effort, they wanted to create a set of headshots of their local staff for their company website. Here are a few of the photos we took for them, both in studio and on location.
I often do lawyer headshots on location, where I’m photographing a number of lawyers for a law firm, but for this headshot photo session, Grace visited my studio in Vancouver on a sunny November afternoon, so I decided to set up the shoot to make use of natural light for a handful of photos. The headshots taken here are a just a couple from the set of photos taken that mixes natural light with flash strobes.
Here, I’m using natural light from the windows bouncing against a large reflector. I’ve added fill light using one of my new favourite studio strobes, the Elinchrom RX One in a Rotalux Octabox. I particularly like the RX One with mixing with natural light indoors because it allows for a very low power setting, making it easy to balance the ambient light with fill light coming from the front.
Getting the right look is about finding the right shutter speed to let that clean natural high-key backlighting come through. The result is a clean high-key headshot in studio as shown below.
This is one of a handful of formal business portraits for one of our professional clients. This photo was taken at my Vancouver photo studio using three studio flashes and a number of reflectors to soften skin and fill in shadows. Such portraits are great for LinkedIn profiles and professional web portfolios, and they take only 20-30 minutes to produce.