Headshots with a little altitude. We headed up to Flagstaff for Western Resource Advocates' staff retreat and photographed 32 people against the fall colors. The brief was the one every team headshot day comes down to: a cohesive look for the whole team, with plenty of room for everyone to be themselves.
About Western Resource Advocates
Western Resource Advocates is a nonprofit working across the American West on clean energy and climate pollution, water and rivers, and land and habitat. A staff retreat in the mountains suits an organization whose work is the West itself, and it put the whole team in one place at one time, which is the hardest part of any company headshot day to arrange.
Why outdoors
Most of our headshot days happen in an office, where the job is to make a conference room look like it was built for portraits. This one went the other way. Flagstaff in the fall does not need any help. The red, orange and yellow leaves behind each person do the work a backdrop would do indoors, and they say something a gray seamless never could: this team works outside the office, and the setting belongs to them.
One look, 32 personalities
Look at the grid at the top of this post. Every portrait shares the same things: the same waist up framing, the same distance from the camera, the same soft fall color behind. That is what makes 32 separate frames read as one team on a staff page.
Everything else is left to the person. A flamingo print shirt, a bolo tie, florals, stripes, a bright yellow cardigan, a denim jacket. Some people stand square to the camera, some turn a shoulder, and the smiles range from polite to full grin. Holding the frame steady is what gives everyone room to be themselves without the set falling apart.
What changes when you take headshots outside
Indoors, the light stays where you put it. Outdoors, the sun keeps moving, clouds come and go, and the background shifts as you change position. On a team shoot that matters, because portrait number 32 has to sit next to portrait number one on the same web page. The answer is the same discipline we bring to an office: settle the setup, keep it fixed, and keep checking every frame against the first.
The background needs the same care. Fall leaves are busy up close, so the people stand well forward of them and the color melts into a soft wash rather than a tangle of branches behind someone's head.
Headshots wherever the team is
A retreat, an offsite or an all hands meeting is often the only day a whole team is in one place, which makes it the easiest day to get everyone photographed. Thanks for a great day, WRA. Most of our headshot sessions happen in offices across the Valley; here is how we approach corporate headshot photography in Phoenix.