Creating Candid Corporate Lifestyle Photography
I often get asked to create candid corporate lifestyle photography of a company’s team, looking their best, looking busy and productive and natural.
These fun and simple looking images can really convey the company’s core brand and culture and are perfect for headers for the corporate bio pages, recruitment and even the IR pages.
Often, these are for web site redesigns or startups.
But, as someone once said, “Simple ain’t simple, is it?”
To successfully create candid corporate lifestyle photography for my clients, it takes a little planning, a little prep, and a little bit of personality!
Getting Started – The Photography Plan
Usually, it starts with a phone call or email that goes something like, “we would like you to come in and take some photographs of our team at work.”
This is where I start asking questions and helping them to define just what that means. A wish list of all of the different photographs gets generated. Other people in the company may chime in and add a few ideas as well.
It is not unusual for this wish list to be much bigger than can be accomplished on a one day shoot at this point. But, that’s okay, because we will refine the wish list into a viable shot list that will meet the goals of the project.
Scouting the Location
A big part of turning that wish list into a shot list is doing a site visit. On a site visit, we can look for those elements, such as architecture, light, work areas etc, that will help us to capture the lifestyle and corporate culture of the company.
What can we shoot natural light and what needs a little boost? What makes this company space unique and interesting? Why would a potential hire want to work here?
Sometimes, some shots get killed during a scout visit in favor of other images that will better tell the company’s story.
Mapping the Production
The last part of the preproduction for the shoot is creating a call sheet of all of the set ups we plan to do, when and where we will be setting up, how many people are needed for each set up and what kind of props we may need.
For example, if we are in a conference room, wouldn’t it look cool if we had laptops and something up on the screen? If we are setting up on a white board, what can be written or what should not be written?
We want to capture the culture, not give away secrets, after all.
A Corporate Culture Shoot Day
With our homework done, we can concentrate on creating “candid” situations that look natural and relaxed because we have worked out a plan to get the best out of everyone!
- Tags: corporate photography
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