Put a collection of staff headshots together and something becomes immediately obvious.
They need to look like they belong together.
The people will naturally be different. Different heights, different face shapes, different hairstyles, glasses, clothing and skin tones. My job isn’t to make the people look the same. It’s to create a consistent photographic style around them while still allowing each person to look like themselves.
That’s where controlled lighting becomes important.
Taking the studio to the client
For corporate headshots, I use studio flash on location. I’m effectively taking a small photography studio into the workplace rather than relying on whatever light happens to be available when I arrive.
Natural light can be beautiful, but it changes. Clouds move, sunlight comes through windows, the weather changes and the light at the beginning of a session can be very different from the light later in the day.
Studio flash gives me control.
Once I’ve established the position, direction and power of my lights, along with my camera settings, I can reproduce that look throughout the session.
The collage below demonstrates exactly why that matters.
Consistency doesn’t mean identical
Look across these portraits and there’s a common style running through them, but every person is still an individual.
That distinction matters to me.
Corporate photography can sometimes become a production line, particularly when a large number of people need to be photographed in a limited amount of time. But the person standing in front of my camera shouldn’t feel like they’re simply the next person in the queue.
Some people immediately relax in front of a camera. Others would rather be anywhere else.
So while my lighting and technical setup remain consistent, the way I work with the person has to change. I’ll talk to them, give simple direction and make small adjustments to their position until we get something that feels natural.
The technical side should be repeatable. The human side shouldn’t be.
Why does this matter to a business?
A single headshot might be used on LinkedIn, an email signature or a company profile.
But put an entire team together on a website and inconsistencies become much more noticeable.
Different lighting, backgrounds, crops and photographic styles can make a team page look as though the photographs have been collected from different places over several years.
Consistent headshots create a much stronger visual identity.
And there’s another advantage to creating a repeatable lighting setup. When somebody new joins the company, I can photograph them in the same style so their portrait fits naturally alongside the existing team.
Good headshots are about more than the camera
There’s a lot happening behind what looks like a relatively simple photograph.
Lighting, exposure, positioning, background, composition and expression all have to work together. When you’re photographing a whole team, you also need a workflow that allows you to repeat those things reliably without losing the individuality of the person standing in front of you.
That’s what I enjoy about this kind of work.
Control the light. Keep the photography consistent. Let the people be themselves.
Ray
