So how easy have you found it to take corporate head shots of your Leadership Team?
We're sharing 3 'Top-Tips' for getting a great set of corporate head shots, PR Shots and LinkedIn profile pictures that offer top quality, great value and flexibility.
Shoot Green Screen...
Finding the perfect spot for the photo session and picking an appropriate background is always an issue. Unfortunately we don't all work in Apple or Google Towers with acres of perfectly designed contemporary office space to act as a backdrop. Many of us work in small, busy offices where a good tidy up is well overdue. And if you chose to shoot outside in the UK you really are running a risk of wet, windy weather spoiling the shoot. Also your CEO is probably too busy to give you and your chosen photographer enough time to try several locations to get the perfect shot. A great solution is to shoot the portraits against a 'Green Screen'. This can be set up in a meeting room or empty office close to where the Leadership Team are meeting so they can pop out in their breaks.
As you'll see from the image above this then allows us to remove the green background in Photoshop and replace it with any background colour, photo or branding that you like. The most popular is pure white like the image at the top of this email. Achieving pure white (so you cannot see the edge of the photo) can be very difficult, but with the 'Green Screen' approach you get perfect results every time. If you want a different look for a different use case then it's a simple editing job to add an appropriate background. If your branding changes and you need a colour or logo updating in the future that's simple too.
Make full use of the opportunity...
At Video2web we charge by the day for our photography services, and we come to you. So pick a day when the leadership team are all in one place. Board meetings and company kick-offs are excellent opportunities to get up to 20 people photographed in one session. This dramatically drives down the cost down per person and gives you the opportunity to offer a new LinkedIn profile picture to a wider audience. This goes down well with our clients and creates a buzz and sense of fun around the office.
Let them chose...
Portraits are an incredibly personal thing. I wish I had a pound for every time I hear at the beginning of a shoot people say they hate having their picture being taken or they can't remember the last time they saw a picture of themselves they liked. We may not be impressionist painters, but we do go to great lengths to use flattering lighting, lenses and camera angles. We take lots of photos and try hard to get our subjects to relax and have a bit of fun during the shoot so we get each subject at their best.
We feel it's important to let each subject choose their favourite shots from the 30 or so we take of each of them. Their choice rarely matches ours...it's so obviously a personal thing. We're always happy to optimise their selected images in Photoshop. By letting the subjects choose the images (rather than you/us) you get their buy in and hopefully they will use the photos widely on 'Social Media'.
We have a dedicated 'Photo Portfolio and Photo Sharing' site above where clients can review a password protected gallery of all the shots we took during their shoot. There is an option to 'Favourite' images as well as 'Select' and 'Download'. This is a great way to quickly let a large group of people make their selections online and in their own time and from anywhere they choose.