Executive Portraits at Scale
Navigating logistics for multi-day corporate headshot productions
When it comes to multi-day executive portrait scheduling, it’s essential to choose an experienced production partner with the knowledge to handle the logistics involved with coordinating such a production with hundreds of employees.
Planning executive headshots at scale is less about lighting and cameras and more about logistics — namely, the challenge of making optimum use of allocated time to all hundreds of employees, VPs and C-suite executives out of normal daily workflow. Efficiency is essential in order to photograph key employees without disrupting business operations.
Hundreds of corporate headshots.
The Logistics of Headshots at Scale
The Problem: Executive calendars are ever-changing and, sometimes, unpredictable. So are dozens of humans in a moderately stressful scenario (getting their picture taken).
The Protocol: Deploy automated scheduling, on-set image selection and strategic editing and processing to accommodate 25-50 executives per photographer, per day.
The Result: Minimized disruption due to multiple photographers, calculated production footprint, and a turnaround of less than 10 minutes per person from check-in to departure.
The Scheduling Key: Minimize Executive Downtime
The traditional approach of notifying employees to “drop by the training room on Tuesday for a headshot” leads to wasted time and effort, and the chance that a busy executive will miss a necessary portrait opportunity.
To optimize the production, large-scale photo shoots must use an automated scheduling matrix segmented by department or seniority. This way, key players are sure to be most efficiently accommodated.
The process is simple — when working with a photographer experienced in this type of production, that is.
The employee checks in with the photo assistant, interacts with the photographer and is put at ease over the course of a five- to six-minute session, during which time the photographer not only elicits a pleasing, comfortable, confident expression from the subject, but also keeps an eye on crucial details to ensure things like ties, collars, jewelry and hair are not distractingly out of place.
Real-Time Tethering for Instant Selection
The big delay in the corporate headshot pipeline typically occurs after the shoot when marketing and HR teams spend days or weeks waiting for employees to make their portrait selections. Inevitably, this approach ends with threatening emails lest the marketing department makes a selection for the indecisive employee. Not a recipe for happy colleagues or efficient workflow. By tethering the camera on set — connecting directly from camera to computer — images are ingested as they’re captured, allowing the photographer and subject to review the take and make a selection before the subject leaves their session.
This approach provides instant feedback — which offers the added benefit of allowing for adjustments to pose, attire and expression, further ensuring employees are happy with how they look. Once the employee signs off on their pick, there’s no need for back-and-forth emails or follow-ups after the session. The photographer simply retouches the images files before formatting and delivering them according to established standards.
By working with a dedicated photographer and his team of professionals, the client is also assured of stylistic continuity and output consistency — so a company’s entire collection of portraits will hang together in visual harmony. This is an often overlooked step in the process, one which adds to the overall perceived brand value of the firm. Hiring an experienced photographer, rather than a production middleman who recruits new photographers based on the lowest (qualified?) bid, a company can be assured that visual artist’s unified vision will translate across all of the portraits, even at scale.
