This corporate team photo has been on our radar for a few months. As it is with most companies these days, the challenge was finding the right moment where everybody in the company would be at the same location and not traveling, at a client meeting, sick, at the remote office or working from home.
Well, the right moment arrived when a training session in downtown Boston brought team members together to one location. The date was set, the time schedule prepared with the photo to be taken later in the afternoon right after the training sessions.
You would think most of the important elements for this corporate team photo were in place, right? We had the location, the date and time and all the subjects in one place. Yet this is where the skill of an experienced photographer comes in.
It started by asking a few simple questions. What would everybody wear? Where exactly in the building would we do the photo shoot? A conference room? The room they are having their training in? The lobby? What security protocol was in place? After all this is downtown Boston. How much time do we have? How are you going to use these photos? What’s the target audience? Wouldn’t they be too tired looking after a whole day of training sessions? How many people would be in the team photo? Was it one big team photo of everybody or are we breaking out into smaller teams as well? What is the light going to be like in the afternoon?
Okay, maybe it was more than a few simple questions, but I had a few more. The most important being: What’s your company’s brand? How would you like your team to be perceived in your new photos? Serious? Fun? Professional? Go-Getters? Forward-thinkers? Approachable?
In my opinion, these questions are by far the most important ones to ask. The answers to those few questions dictated the location for the photo shoot, the lighting, the way everybody will be posed, what they wore and so on.
An experienced photographer knows to ask these types of questions before hand to help guide the client to what it is they really want. After all, they are coming to you as the expert. And that expertise will almost always show itself in the final product, as it does here.
