The single biggest thing you can do is show up with a the creative decisions already agreed on. For any shoot, most of what makes a shoot day run long or come back with the wrong images traces back to decisions that should have been made before anyone picked up a camera.
For corporate portraits, we’re dealing with that tenfold. If someone shows up in a bright red suit and everyone else is wearing earth tones and business casual, we’re either reshooting or driving to Moores. At that point, buying a new outfit is cheaper.
We shoot a lot of headshots, team photos, on-location content, and behind-the-scenes footage for corporate clients. From large banks to small firms, we know your content is about showcasing your team at their best.
The shoots that go smoothly almost always have the same thing in common: the planning happened long before shoot day, not during it.
Start with compiling your reference images. It doesn’t need to be fancy, you don’t need a Pinterest mood board, and you might even be working with last year’s photos (or last decade’s, more likely).
Just try to capture the tone you’re after. Are we going bright and clean, or moody and dramatic? Candid and documentary-style, or posed and polished? I can assure you, we’ve shot it all, but different looks require different equipment. If we set up a remote studio, we can’t just reach into our bag of tricks for an extra reflector (well, sometimes we can). But, that doesn’t change that we should be on the same page long before we’re setting up.
The next step, for your own sake, is to build the shot list, organized by where each image will actually be used. If any of the images are being comped, like into a large group banner for a website hero image, we need to know to place the subject on a high-contrast background for clipping.
Your shot list will help plan backward from where the image needs to live, not forward from “let’s just see what we get.” A shot list also tells us how much time to budget for each setup, which keeps the day on schedule and the time and money budgets both under control.
Wardrobe matters more than people expect. Solid colours photograph more consistently than busy patterns, and it’s worth aligning on a rough colour palette across everyone being photographed so the final set of images feels cohesive rather than mismatched. If it’s an outdoor or on-location shoot, we’ll also want a backup plan for weather, and enough daylight hours if we’re not bringing our studio lighting.
Between wardrobe changes, moving locations, and giving people a minute to relax in front of the camera, shoots almost always take longer than the shot list alone suggests. Padding fifteen to twenty minutes into your schedule is a lot less stressful than watching the light change while people are still getting comfortable in front of the lens.
When we’re looking at professional headshots, we’re looking at dozens of executive portraits at a time. When your board members, leadership teams, or even just a couple of new hires are looking to match the look and quality of your professional headshots, you don’t want to cut corners.
Reach out to us and we can help plan this out from the start, to make sure everything goes smoothly.
