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The Office Group Portrait Photography

How do you create a group portrait for marketing purposes, anyway?

Just a quick note: The concept of the corporate team portrait or executive group portrait has evolved a bit since this was posted.

You may also want to look at this post about how to fake a group portraits. 

There is also this one about how to why group portraits suck your marketing budget.

Sodexho Group Portrait on location
For Sodexho

How do you create a group portrait for marketing purposes, anyway?

For me and my team, unless there is an extremely compelling reason, we try to stay off the plain, vanilla hung background and find something interesting in the environment.

Something that will talk about the team we are photographing.

In this case, the end client ran a restaurant style dining hall.

It was a well designed and lit space, with interesting colors and graphic elements. It also allowed us to build layers into the composition.

We balance the daylight, ambient and added a couple of strobes to punch up the dark areas and then started adding the people in one by one. All in all, it was about a two hour set up to complete.

Is it worth the time it takes to set up the Group Portrait?

This is a difficult question, because it depends a lot on your marketing goals. The best answer I can think of to that is to think like a magazine editor.

If you were laying out an article about your company and wanted to get the readers’ attention, what would you put on the cover: a couple of plain headshots or an image with rich colors that illustrates the company story?

What would you want to see if you were reading the story?

Related Stories from the Studio . . .

The CEO Portrait session for Seaside Therapeutics' Randall Carpenter

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