What happens on a company headshot day
If you have been handed "sort out headshots for everyone" and you have never organised a shoot before, this is what you are actually signing up for. It is less work than you think, as long as three things are decided early.
Before the day
We agree a running order. You send a list of names and rough availability, we send back a schedule with time slots. This is the single biggest factor in whether the day runs well. Without it you get fourteen people standing in a corridor at 10am and nobody at 3pm.
Ten-minute slots work for most teams. We build in gaps so late arrivals do not derail everything.
We confirm the space. If we are coming to you, we need roughly 3m by 4m with a plain wall or room for a backdrop, and (this is the one people forget) a power socket near where we will actually be shooting.
That last point matters more than it sounds. If there is no reliable power we will plan for battery lighting instead, which is completely fine, but we need to know beforehand rather than discovering it at 8:45am. If you are not sure, send a photo of the room.
You send one email round. Something like: Headshots on the 14th. Your slot is at 11:20. Wear what you would wear to a client meeting, bring an alternative top, avoid busy patterns. That is genuinely all the briefing anyone needs.
On the day
Setup takes about 45 minutes before the first person. Lighting, backdrop, tethering, test frames. You do not need to be involved.
Each person takes five to ten minutes. They arrive, we chat for thirty seconds, we shoot. Most people are visibly nervous for the first minute and fine after that: the schedule accounts for it.
We are shooting tethered, so images appear on a screen as we go. People can see how it is going, which is the fastest way to get someone to relax.
We keep the queue moving so you do not have to. If someone does not show up, we shoot the next person and slot them back in later.
Realistic throughput: a half day comfortably covers 6 to 15 people. A full day covers 15 to 30. Beyond that we would talk about a second day or a second setup.
The consistency part
Everything that makes the grid match (light, background, distance, crop) stays locked for the whole day. What changes is the direction, per person.
This is the difference between a team page that looks coherent and one that looks processed. A senior partner and a graduate developer need different things from a camera, and giving them the same instruction produces thirty photographs of people being told what to do.
We keep the setup notes on file afterwards. When someone joins in eight months, they come in for a single session and drop straight into the same grid. This is the thing most companies wish they had asked about at the start, and it is why the lighting notes are worth more than the photographs.
Afterwards
Everyone gets a private gallery of their own images and picks their own finals. Nobody has their photo chosen for them by HR, which removes a genuinely annoying category of internal complaint.
Two retouched finals per person as standard. Delivery within two weeks, with high-resolution and web-ready files and standard crops for the website, LinkedIn, press and print.
What to decide early
Our studio or your office. Studio is simpler; office is less disruptive to the day.
House style or not. Everyone in dark tops looks deliberate. No rule looks more human. Both are fine; pick one.
Who is actually included. Headcount drives the price, and finding three extra people on the day is easier than losing three.
What it costs
One person is £275 at our studio or £400 at your office. Small teams from £600, half day from £850, full day from £1,400. We are not VAT registered, so no VAT is added to any figure shown.
Request a date with your headcount and a rough week, and we will come back with a fixed price and a running order.
