How to Organise a Team Headshot Day (Without Losing a Week)

Somebody in every company gets handed this job: make everyone's photos match, disrupt nobody, and have it done by the board meeting. Most often it lands on office managers, HR or marketing, with no guidance at all. After three decades of shooting team days in London offices, here's the plan we wish every organiser received.

What a team headshot day is

A team headshot day means a photographer sets up a portable studio at your office and photographs everyone in one visit: consistent background, consistent lighting, individual portraits and usually a few group shots. Companies use the results on websites, LinkedIn profiles, proposals and press pages.

Consistency is the real product. Ten headshots taken by ten photographers in ten different years make a company page look like a ransom note. One session, one setup, and the whole team suddenly looks like it belongs to the same organisation. That matters because these photos travel: they end up in pitch decks, conference bios and news coverage, often for years.

Formal and relaxed versions can come out of the same day. We tend to shoot both for each person, since the website might want approachable while the investor deck wants composed.

How long it actually takes

Allow around ten minutes per person once the studio is set up, and about 45 minutes for the setup itself. A team of ten fits comfortably into a morning. Thirty people is a full day with sensible breaks, and anything beyond forty deserves a second visit rather than a rushed single one.

Ten minutes sounds short until you watch it work. Nobody wants to stand in front of a camera for an hour, least of all at work with colleagues nearby. A short slot keeps energy up and diaries intact.

Two details protect the schedule. Book the photographer's setup time before the first slot, not inside it. And resist compressing slots below ten minutes to squeeze more people in: the last twenty sitters of an over packed day all get the same tired treatment, and you'll see it in the frames.

The space you need

A meeting room of roughly three by four metres does the job. We bring lights, backdrop and everything else, so window light's a bonus, not a requirement. It doesn't need much beyond a door that closes, a power socket, and freedom from through-traffic for the duration.

Ceiling height matters more than you'd expect: anything under about 2.3 metres makes lighting a taller person awkward. If your building has a choice of rooms, pick the one with the highest ceiling rather than the nicest view. Photographing in a corridor or an open plan corner can be done, and we've done it, but sitters relax faster when passers by aren't reviewing their performance.

Scheduling that holds

Publish a slot list, not a vague window. Give every person a named ten minute booking, cluster departments together, and leave the occasional empty slot as a buffer. Put the people who dread it most in the middle of the day, never first or last.

An open invitation to "come down whenever suits" produces a queue at lunchtime and an empty room at three. Named slots survive contact with reality, and the occasional buffer absorbs the meeting that overran and the person who was on a call.

Plan for absences on the day itself, because there'll be some. Agree in advance whether stragglers get rescheduled into a future session or photographed at our Clapham studio, and the no shows stop being a crisis. More on the long game in the consistency section below.

Getting the team on side

Send one short email a week ahead covering the three things people ask: what to wear, how long it takes, and what the photos are for. Reassure the reluctant that sessions are quick, directed, and that they choose their favourite frame. Dread melts once people know they keep a veto.

We've written before that a team session can be a decent team building exercise, even for those who were secretly dreading it beforehand, and we stand by that. Fifteen relaxed minutes with a photographer who talks to you beats an hour of trust falls.

Point everyone at a short wardrobe note so they're not left guessing. Ours is here: what to wear for corporate headshots. Generally plain mid-tone colours, no busy patterns, bring a jacket. That single email prevents most of the day's problems before it starts.

Consistency, new starters and what it costs

Choose a background and lighting style you can repeat, and new starters can be matched into the set later without the whole team reshooting. We keep a record of each company's setup for exactly this reason. Team days are priced approximately by headcount and location, so ask for a quote.

This is the question to ask any photographer you're comparing: can you reproduce this setup in a year, for one person, without it looking bolted on? LinkedIn's own advice pushes individuals towards photos that look like them today, and the company page equivalent is a set that still matches after two hiring rounds.

We run team days across London from our base in Clapham, individual sessions start from £180, and recent team work is in our gallery. If you've just been handed this job, drop us a line and we'll help you build the slot list before you promise anyone a date.

Quick questions from organisers

A few questions come up on nearly every team booking, often within minutes of the first phone call. Here are the short answers, so you can plan the day, brief your team and defend the budget before anyone commits to a date.

How many photos does each person get?

Typically each person picks their favourite from a short gallery, and that frame gets retouched. Some packages include more per head. Agree the number before the day, and tell the team, since knowing they choose the winner calms most nerves

Do group shots happen on the same day?

Yes, and it's the cheapest time to do them, while everyone's dressed for it and the lighting is up. Schedule groups around natural gathering points such as lunchtime, rather than asking thirty people to reassemble at five.

Can remote staff be matched into the set?

Usually, if the photographer keeps a record of the background, lighting and crop. Remote joiners can be photographed at the studio on the same setup and dropped seamlessly into the website grid. Ask for this before the first session, not after.