Corporate Headshots and Portraits for London Law Firms
We were recently assigned to photograph 34 consultants, solicitors and partners for the central London law firm Piper Smith Watton who’s new website went live today.
This was a fun and challenging assignment. It consisted of photographing their staff over 2 days in different poses in 2 studios that we had set up at their offices. We were also commissioned to photograph 5 London night scenes on which we superimposed the profile portrait images.
We loved the concept & vision of the new website as shown to us at planning meetings with the law firms Tricia Hart, Head of Marketing & Business Development. Tricia required us to deliver our images in black & white thus keeping the striking bold theme of the website in red, white, black and shades of grey.
1) Studio 1 ‘The overview image’
This image is used to introduce the person and when clicked on takes the viewer to the next profile image. We set up the background using a seamless black paper roll on which we placed an armchair. We shot various poses giving the subject a friendly approachable portrait.
Equipment used: Nikon D3, Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G ED, 2x Elinchrom flash units BRX 500, Elinchrom Varistar Umbrella as main light, Elinchrom Portalite Softbox as the hair light.
2) Studio 2 ‘The expertise image’
These images were shot with the subject standing against a white and green screen background, again these images were shot giving the subject a friendly approachable portrait. One image was chosen and superimposed on a night time London scene that represented their area of expertise such as Retail, Private Client, Real Estate etc.
Equipment used: Nikon D4, Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G ED, 2x Elinchrom flash units 600RX, Elinchrom Rotalux 135cm as the main light, Lastolite HiLite Chromakey background.
3) Office ‘Image selection’
A total of 5,038 exposures were taken over 2 days (wow!) an average of 148 images per person in both studios – various poses were taken for use in different marketing usage.
Immediately after the staff where photographed in both studio’s they went next door to an office where we had set up a viewing station on an iMac where the the final images were to be viewed and chosen. The choice process was led by Tricia and all the images were shown to the person we had photographed and together they chose 1 image from each studio set up. There is a tremendous time saving benefit in choosing the images straight away.
