Team headshot day

The pace is about seven minutes a person including changeover, and it holds only when there is a schedule and somebody internally owns it. Walk-up sessions with no booking sheet halve the throughput, because the set sits idle between people and nobody knows when their turn is. A scheduling sheet is supplied with the booking for exactly this reason; it is the single thing that decides whether a headshot day photographs forty people or twenty-two.

The set needs about twelve by fifteen feet with a ceiling of eight feet or more, and a power outlet. A conference room with the table pushed aside works; a corridor does not. Windows are welcome but not required, and that is the point of an on-site day — every person gets identical light regardless of what the weather did, so the finished directory reads as one team rather than as a collage assembled over three years.

Tell people what is happening before the day, not on it. A one-line email naming the date, the room, the wardrobe suggestion and the seven-minute slot removes almost every problem an on-site day has: the person who arrives in a logo polo, the person who did not know and is on a call, the person who has been dreading it since Tuesday. Companies that send that email photograph their whole team; companies that do not photograph whoever happened to walk past.

Remote staff are photographed separately in their own city, lit to the same written specification, and quoted per person. The specification is the part worth keeping: background, lighting and crop recorded at the first session, so somebody hired eighteen months later still matches the page. Without it a directory drifts visibly within a year, which is the problem the day was booked to solve. Up to forty people in five hours from $1,400, delivered within five business days with a commercial licence for company use.