Headshots Photography for Corporate Portairt Photographers

There is a huge market and demand for headshot photography for business cards, passports, advertising, website, brochures, press kits, model & actor / actresses portfolio, etc. Every business needs this for their staff. This is a simple head & shoulder shot of a person against a plain or coloured background or backdrop. This is called ‘headshot photography’

There is a continuous requirements for headshot photography and they need to be updated every 2 years so it reflects the person’s age, hair style and colour, etc. These shots are needed for publicity & PR, brochures, business cards, website, security badges and so on. Not only businesses require these, but people like actors, actresses & models need them too for their portfolio.

Lets start with what you need to do headshots. The headshots needs to be flattering and designed to enhance their features and minimise flaws. Make-up and hair should ideally be done professionally if these are for model or actor / actresses portfolio. Wardrobe should be thought about before the shoot and you should allow for multiple wardrobe changes.

If the headshots are required for business use or for staff pictures, you don’t need wardrobe changes, however, you will need to work pretty fast as you don’t want to waste time of the staff sitting in front of the camera for long periods of time and costing the company valuable man hours. If you are slow and use too much of their time, you will lose that company as your customer. It is even more important when photographing directors or members of the board. Quite often you will have only about 2-3 minutes per person. They are busy people and you need to work extremely fast.

When doing headshot photography for corporate clients, you will be asked to come over to their office and shoot the images. Here again, you need to cause minimum disruption to their working environment. Don’t take over the office with your light stands, cables, leads & equipment. Keep your kit to a minimal.

PRICING & PRODUCT

Many photographers struggle to price the job correctly as the product required by the company is just digital files. Remember that the copyright always stays with the photographer, you give the rights to reproduce the images for their business use.

The way to cost the job is very easy. Direct costs for headshot photography is very minimal and the major factor is your time. So if you think the job will take 3 hours, then charge 3 hours x hourly rate + any direct costs i.e travel, etc. It is up to you how much mark-up you put on your total costs.

Lets have a look at a ‘real life’ job. The brief was to create headshots for 5 employees. I was to photograph the headshots at their head office.

As you can see from the images of the room I was going to do the headshots in, there wasn’t any plain wall available which I could use as my background. I had a Lastolite background but if I can use a plain wall, there is no need to set up the background up and saves time.

Then I noticed the frosted windows and that is what I was looking for. I only need a little bit of space to do the headshots in. I set up my portable lighting kit which consisted of a Nikon SB900 , a diffused umbrella and a light stand.

I used a Nikon SU800 Commander unit to trigger my remote Nikon SB900 .

The SB900 was set to Group A Channel 1 and so was the SU800 Commander. This is very important, they must be able to ‘talk’ to each other. Pressing the little test button (orange coloured) on the SU800 will trigger the flash and you know that they are set correctly.

The other important factor to consider is the sensor on the flashgun must ‘see’ or ‘receive’ the infra-red light from the SU800. This is very important when shooting outdoors but not indoors. The infra-red light is reflected from the walls even if the sensor on the SB900 or SB800 is away from you. A good discipline is to always keep the flash gun sensor facing you as you can see from the image below. This is why I use a diffused umbrella and also I like the soft diffused light when using a shoot through umbrella.

I use a Lastolite 80cm Umbrella – Translucent White and this works fine for me. What I would recommend is the Lastolite all-in-one lighting kit. This is portable & light weight. As I said earlier on, I need to be really fast to set up and shoot. It takes me less than 2 minutes to set up a lightstand, Nikon SB900 or SB800 and an umbrella. No wires around me and all works really well. The Lastolite Lighting kit is £82.99p from Warehouse Express .

Now to setting up the exposure. I get my subject and do a test shot. The ideal lens for this is either a Nikon 85mm , 105 or a 70-200mm . I use the Nikon 105mm for this kind of shot.

Here is the set up shot. 1/100 f/5 ISO 320. The output of the flash was set to around 1/16. As the flash is pretty close to the subject, I don’t need to fire it all full output. This is critical for fast recycling of the flash gun and you don’t need to wait around a few seconds for the flash to be ready. I’m pretty much firing the shots one after the other.

Here is the final image as shot.

It would have been very easy to make the background completely white by using a second flash gun on the background. But I preferred the light grey graduated colour on the background and kept it that way. I usually take about 8-10 shots of each person in 2 different poses. This will give you enough choice to pick the best few images. You don’t need to give all the images, just the best 3 images per person.

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To recap:

– Keep things very simple

– Be quick to set up

– Don’t take over the office

– Dress smart. No jeans & trainers!

Hope you enjoyed this article post and feel free to write any comments or feedback.