Corporate Headshots: How to Run a Team 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 one afternoon, all needing to look like they belong on the same page, is a production, and it gets planned like one.

The one rule: the set never moves

A matched set lives or dies on consistency. The background, the key light, the camera height and the distance to the subject all stay fixed from the first sitter to the last. Change any of them halfway through and the set stops reading as a set, however good the individual frames are.

Daylight is the usual saboteur. A cloud at 2pm changes your fill; a bright window changes your background. A room that blacks out removes both problems before they start, which is why this is studio work even though any office has a white wall.

The room

Studio B is built as a room within a room, blackout capable, with a colour-washable cyclorama: corporate grey, warm neutral or the brand's own colour, set once and held for the whole day. Shut the daylight out and the light on sitter twelve is the light on sitter one. Portrait and editorial work is what the room already does, and make-up and styling zones sit alongside it.

• Fix the set before the first sitter arrives and do not touch it again until the last one leaves. That includes the stands, not just the light.
• Keep the queue off the set. Scope has a dressing and prep room and a client lounge, and a sitter who has not watched the previous person being lit arrives calmer.
• Decide crop and orientation before the day. A LinkedIn-only brief and a print-and-web brief want different framing, and changing your mind on sitter nine costs a reshoot of eight.

Shoot a reference frame before the first sitter and check every break against it. Drift you catch at sitter three is a fix; drift you catch in the edit is a reshoot.

Booking the block honestly

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 the block. Lights are not in the room rate: they are charged separately, so please enquire about our lights when you book. The time matters as much as the money. The first stretch of your booking goes on rigging and the reference frame, not on faces, so a tight sitter list in a short block is how consistency slips.

Work the arithmetic backwards from the headcount. Allow a realistic ten to fifteen minutes per sitter in the chair, changeover included, then add the rig and de-rig at either end. That maths tells you honestly whether your list fits a half day or needs the full one, and a photographer relighting under time pressure is precisely the failure the longer block exists to prevent.

Schedule the people, not just the room

The room is the easy half. The harder half is getting twelve people to arrive on time, in order, without the day sliding an hour before lunch. A written schedule with named slots beats a headcount, and a colleague on site chasing the list matters more than anything about the lighting.

A run sheet for twelve sitters

Here is what named slots look like for twelve sitters in a four-hour half day, at twelve minutes a sitter. Times run from the start of the booking, not the clock:

• 0:00 to 0:40 — rig, test and shoot the reference frame, with nobody waiting.
• 0:40 to 1:40 — sitters one to four, then twelve minutes to check a frame against the reference and catch up.
• 1:40 to 2:40 — sitters five to eight, same pattern.
• 2:40 to 3:40 — sitters nine to twelve, same pattern.
• 3:40 to 4:00 — a last look at the set, then pack down.

Call sitters in blocks of four, each ten minutes before their slot, so someone running late swaps with the next name instead of pushing the whole list. At fifteen minutes a sitter the same twelve need about four and a half hours, which means booking the full day. On paper a full day holds six of those hour-long blocks, twenty-four sitters, with an hour for lunch in the middle.

What sitters should wear

Send this with the schedule, a week ahead, so nobody reads it on the morning:

• Solid colours that contrast with the background. Tell people the backdrop colour once it is chosen, so nobody arrives dressed to disappear into it.
• No fine stripes, small checks or tight herringbone. Fine repeating patterns can produce moiré, a rippling interference pattern that is slow to retouch out.
• No large logos or slogans, unless it is the company's own.
• Glasses if they wear them every day. The photographer can angle the light, or tilt the frames slightly, to keep reflections off the lenses.
• A spare top on a hanger, in case of a spill or a clash.
• Hair and make-up as they would wear them to an important meeting. A little matte powder takes the shine off under studio light.
• One dress code for the whole team, jacket or no jacket, tie or no tie, so the set looks like a set.