A different approach to staff portrait photography

What could an individual staff portrait be saying about your team?

It’s staff portrait time again. That means you have a choice: do roughly what you did last time, which probably means the same, standard headshots of roughly the same pool of people who look roughly the same (just a bit older). Or…

I was at Knighton Foods, a specialist in powdered foods (and producer for brands such as Smash, Birds and Angel Delight) for a corporate portrait shoot with a difference.

Under the skin
It probably helped that this wasn’t my first commercial photography shoot for Knighton’s, so working with the team was easy, and felt rather like picking up where we left off. Last time I was there to showcase the production facilities for the company’s new website, which was being designed by Furious Lemon.

This time, on another Furious Lemon commission, the task was to take a different approach to corporate portraits. But how do you reinvent something that has stuck to pretty much the same tried and tested format since the invention of the camera?

For me, the answer lay in getting under the skin of Knighton’s. This isn’t a business with a stiff and formal approach to life. You get a collaborative, supportive feeling from the senior leaders, a feeling that they’ve got each other’s backs.

Of course the senior team is serious and committed to the work they do, but the way they do it (from my perspective at least) is in a human, personable way. And I wanted to put that on film.

All in this together
The resulting corporate portraits don’t feel especially corporate. For one thing, everyone is giving me their best natural and unforced smile – no steely grimaces or stern faces here.

Far more unusual was the idea of bringing everyone together for each shot, and placing the main subject in the foreground, almost as though we’ve just drawn them away from a conversation they’ll be getting back to in a moment.

It’s perhaps a rather literal interpretation of ‘we’ve got each other’s backs’ but it also makes every image reinforce the implied message that this is a team that works together – something that individual corporate portrait shots can rarely do.

You’ll find the complete suite of portraits here.

Ready to renew the commercial portrait photography for your Lancashire business? Let’s talk. You can find me here.

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