We’ve carried 1,000s of shoots for clients. Here is a list of things you need to research and plan for a successful shoot.
Feel free to copy and use this list as you like.
Research and questions to ask
- Does the photographer offer a planning call?
- How many images will you get?
- How many images will be edited?
- How will you choose your final images for editing?
- How much will it cost to get more images that originally quoted?
- What are the usage rights for the images and for how long can you use them?
- Get the photographer to review your brand, website and current photography along with any ideas and input that you have so they can write up a brief for you to approve.
- What is the photographer’s availability like?
- What options are the for creating consistent headshots? e.g. white, grey, colour backgrounds, or using your environment.
- What suggestions are there for showing the individuality of your people and character of your organisation?
- How long does it take to get proofs and final, edited images from the shoot?
- How much is it going to cost?
Planning the shoot
- Schedule staff: How long does the photographer need with each person? Do they need a schedule or can it be a drop-in?
- Determine if you need to create the schedule yourself or find out if the photographer can handle booking time slots directly.
- Decide what people should wear and if they should have more than one option.
- Identify where in your office works for consistent headshots (a meeting room will work if the photographer brings a backdrop). Consider other locations for variety in the photos.
- If in a shared office, get permission from the building managers.
- Plan for contingency if doing photos outside and the weather is bad. Decide if you can move inside or reschedule.
- Create a shot list for marketing, social media, and specific pages of your website. This is a good opportunity to get a bank of images for future use.
- Send an email to staff to communicate the reasons for the shoot, set expectations, and help them prepare.
- Book the rooms needed on the shoot day.
On the day
- Clear out any clutter form the office if it’s going to be used as part of the shoot
- What time will the photographer arrive to set up?
- Who will manage getting people to their time slots and keeping a record of who has been phtographed?
- Do you want to check some images to approve them?
- Usually the photographer should be able to be left to their own devices to work through the photography.
After the shoot
- What is the process for receiving proofs and making your selections?
- Ask your photographer to send you web ready and print ready versions of the photos. This will be easy for them to do and will save you loads of time later because you won’t have to resize the files.
- Tell the photographer how you would prefer to receive the images. This could be Dropbox, WeTransfer or other file sharing platforms. If you have an internal method for receiving files ask to use that.
- Ensure your photographer keeps copies of the files once they have sent them to you so you have them as a back up.
- Find out if the photographer can name the files so they correspond to the people in the shot. This should make it much easier for you to identify the images.
- Work out where you will store the images, if you will send to individual team members and how you will load to your CMS