Most corporate photography fails for administrative reasons rather than aesthetic ones. The headshots do not match because they were taken by five people over five years. The files arrive full-frame and somebody in marketing spends a week cropping them. Nobody can answer whether the images may be used in a paid campaign, so they are quietly used anyway. This page is about the parts that prevent that.
Seven kinds of work, usually bought separately and at a premium, that sit far more cheaply inside a single planned engagement. Sections that overlap with the wider practice link across rather than repeating themselves.
Shot to one agreed look — the same background, the same key and fill, the same crop and the same retouching standard — so a leadership page or a staff directory reads as one set rather than an assembly of whatever each person had to hand. Lighting positions, lens, distance and background are recorded at the first session, which means a joiner photographed eight months later matches the people they are standing beside on the page. Matching new starters to an existing set is part of the service, not a new shoot.
What most companies actually want when they ask for headshots: the engineer at the bench, the surgeon in theatre, the trader at the desk, lit properly and shot where the work happens. These carry a story a plain backdrop cannot, they date far more slowly, and they crop well into the wide banners and narrow columns that websites and reports keep needing.
Interiors, floor space, plant and equipment, operations in progress. Useful for careers pages, capability decks, tenders, investor material and property marketing. Shot with the perspective control an interior needs, exposure-blended so windows keep their view, and scheduled around the hours when the space looks like itself rather than the hours that were convenient to book.
Real working moments for careers and recruiting pages: collaboration that is actually happening, the space people occupy, the parts of the day a candidate would recognise. Directed lightly rather than staged, because staged culture photography is transparent and does more harm to a careers page than no photography at all.
Keynotes, panels, launches, exhibition floor and award evenings, with speaker names and titles checked against the programme and a same-night selection for press and social while the event is still running. The full approach is under event photography — for a corporate programme it is usually scoped together with the headshots and the workplace work, in one visit.
Product, packaging and pack-shot work for commercial use, tethered and consistent across a range. The craft detail is under product photography. What matters here is that commercial licensing, including paid media, is priced and written into the same agreement as the rest of the engagement.
Press portraits supplied at wire-service resolution with correct IPTC caption, credit and usage embedded, so a picture desk can use them without calling. Imagery for annual reports and investor material, shot to the page grid where one exists and delivered with the bleed and color profile the printer specifies.
One consistent look across a whole team: the same background, the same key and fill, the same crop and the same retouching standard, recorded at the first session so a joiner photographed eight months later still matches the people they stand beside.
Not every company photographs well in a meeting room. Warehousing, distribution, construction, laboratories and workshops all shoot differently — hard hats and hi-vis on site, controlled light and a long lens in a lab, and a schedule that works around the operation rather than stopping it.
Team headshots and the commercial day rate are listed — book and pay outright, or ask for an invoice or PO and the dates are held while it goes through your finance system. Everything here is PO-eligible; family, newborn, portrait, pet and wedding bookings are card only.
The expensive pattern is commissioning reactively: a headshot for a press release, a floor picture for a tender, three product shots for a deck, each booked at short notice with its own minimum. A library shoot covers the year’s foreseeable needs in one or two days.
None of the following is about equipment. All of it is about whether the pictures are usable, defensible and repeatable a year from now.
The agreement says where the images may be used, in which territories, for how long, and whether paid media is included. Broad, worldwide and perpetual licences are all available and are priced as such; full transfer of copyright is possible where a project genuinely requires it and is agreed explicitly rather than assumed. Most photographers’ sites are vague here, which is exactly why it becomes a problem two years later when a picture turns up in an advertising campaign nobody licensed it for. Full terms are set out under rights and usage.
Web files at the pixel dimensions your templates take, sharpened for screen. Print files at 300 ppi at final size in the profile your printer asks for, soft-proofed. Social crops framed at capture. Directory and CMS images at the exact aspect ratio the platform enforces, so nothing gets center-cropped through somebody’s forehead. The list is agreed in the brief; see deliverables and formats.
The retouching standard is set before the first sitting and applied identically across the set: blemishes and stray hair, yes; reshaped faces, no, unless you ask and everyone photographed knows. Consistency matters more than degree — a page where one person has been smoothed and the rest have not is more conspicuous than a page where nobody has.
A schedule that fits the business day, with short sitting times per person for team shoots — typically a few minutes each on a running slot, so nobody loses a morning — and a running order that can absorb the two people who will inevitably be late. A compact lighting setup that fits a meeting room rather than needing one cleared. Where a brand guideline exists, it is read first and worked to: background color, crop, aspect ratio, tone.
Screens, whiteboards, documents, prototypes andnameplates all end up in frame if nobody is watching for them. They are watched for, and anything sensitive is composed out or cleared before the frame is taken rather than retouched afterward. Work is done under a mutual non-disclosure agreement where required, and images made under one are not shown anywhere, including in this site’s own work section, without written permission.
Net 30 against your PO number. We reply to procurement requests within one business day. Certificate of insurance available on request. Tell us which quotation, W-9 or supplier registration you need.
The setup cost of a corporate shoot is mostly access, scheduling and lighting. Once that is paid, adding a short film or a set of interview clips is comparatively cheap, and the people who agreed to be photographed are already in the building.
Company films, capability and recruitment pieces, leadership messages that people will sit through, cut to the length the audience will actually give you and delivered with the vertical versions.
Narration and voiceover, internal podcast recording and post, and audio for the film itself — treated as its own session rather than whatever the camera happened to record.
Brief, recce, shoot, selects, two rounds of revision, delivery and archive — with the deliverable list, the usage and the dates fixed in writing at the start.
Send the pages, decks and channels the images have to serve, roughly how many people are involved and where they are. That is enough to come back with a scope, a schedule that fits your business day, and a usage license written in plain terms.