Corporate Headshots: How to Run a Headshot Day

A headshot day is a different job to a portrait sitting. One person in front of a camera for an hour is a portrait. Twelve people in front of the same camera in the same afternoon, all needing to end up looking like they belong on the same page, is a production — and it is planned differently from the start.

The one rule: nothing changes between sitters

A matched set of headshots — a team page, an agency roster, a LinkedIn refresh for a whole department — lives or dies on consistency. The background, the key light, the camera height and the distance to the subject all need to stay fixed from the first sitter to the last. Change any of them halfway through the day and the set stops reading as a set, however good any individual frame is.

That is an argument for a controlled room over anything with daylight in it. A cloud passing over at 2pm changes your fill light; a client walking past a window changes your background. A sound-treated, blackout-capable room removes both problems before they start.

The room

Studio B is built as a room within a room, with a colour-washable cyclorama — corporate grey, warm neutral or the brand's own colour, set once and held for the whole day. Portrait and editorial work is already what the room is used for, and the same set-up that suits one considered portrait suits twelve identical ones back to back.

• Fix the set before the first sitter arrives, and do not touch it again until the last one leaves — that includes the light stands, not just the light itself.
• Shoot a colour and exposure reference frame at the start, and check against it after any break in the day.
• Keep sitters moving through a holding area rather than the set itself. Scope has a dressing and prep room and a client lounge for exactly this — people waiting where the next sitter cannot see the current one being lit tends to keep nerves down.
• Decide crop and orientation before the day, not during it. A LinkedIn-only brief and a print-and-web brief want different framing, and it is cheaper to decide once than to reshoot a face because the crop changed on sitter nine.

Booking the block

Studio B runs at £120 for two hours, £220 for a half day and £420 for a full day, and set-up and pack-down sit inside whichever block you book — so the room is genuinely shooting for close to the full booked time, not losing the first half hour to rigging. For a headshot day, work backwards from your sitter count: a half day comfortably covers a department, a full day a company. Book the longer block if you are near the edge of one — a photographer relighting under time pressure is exactly how consistency slips.

The set that never moves is the set that never stops looking like itself.

Scheduling the people, not just the room

The room is the easy part. The harder part is usually getting twelve or twenty people to actually turn up on time, in the right order, without the whole day sliding by an hour before lunch. A written schedule with named slots — not just a headcount — and a colleague at the venue chasing the list tends to matter more than anything about the lighting.