Chris Korsak

Portland Branding, headshot, and product photographer

Composite of nine staff member headshots from Summit Learning Charter School

Staff Headshots at Summit Learning Charter School

October 28, 2019

Here’s the story…of Summit Learning Charter…needing headshots of all their lovely staff. In all seriousness, I recently created headshots of 40 staff members at Summit Learning Charter, which is an online K-12 school within the Estacada, Oregon school district. This job required photographing staff members at two different locations over two days. Although it’s no easy task to coordinate that many people with busy schedules, someone named Kim at Summit helped out with logistics so everything would run smoothly and efficiently. Full disclosure: she’s my sister! :)

Consistency is Key with Staff Headshots

In my opinion, staff headshots on a company’s website should have a consistent look and feel (lighting, wardrobe, and background). You don’t want things to look all over the place, because it simply draws attention to the wrong things. Why does this happen?

Here are some reasons:

  • The lighting is inconsistent from shot to shot
  • The staff didn’t get any attire guidelines
  • The background is inconsistent or too busy

Many times a company will just ask staff members to submit a “nice-looking” headshot for use on the company website. While the photos themselves may be good, they certainly won’t match. You end up with a hodge-podge of photos that are competing for visual attention instead of conveying the idea, “We’re a team!”

With these three things in mind, I’m going to describe how I approached this job in order to keep things as consistent as possible.

Lighting

Natural light can look great, but it doesn’t always play nicely with business schedules. Also, here in Portland there are about 7 months a year of dreary, grey, low-light. For these reasons, photographing staff headshots with artificial light (strobes) is a great way to go. For this job I brought a very simple setup of two lights, a white seamless background, and a couple bounce cards to fill in the shadows. I think this lighting look is flattering on all ages, shapes, and sizes.

I had everyone sit on an apple box and hold a bounce card in their lap “like they were reading a really big book.” After shooting a number of frames, I showed each person their photos on the back of my camera, and they chose their favorite on the spot. Five to ten minutes per person was nice because it was efficient, but it also gave me enough time to make a connection and get a genuine photo. Take a look at those beaming expressions above. Do they look like they’re at work? No way.

Here’s a closer look at my setup during day 1:

Behind the scenes to show my headshot lighting setup Staff headshot of my sister

Above, you can see my sister is sitting in place while holding a bounce card in her lap. Again, the bounce cards help control shadows and make sure there’s plenty of light in the eyes. Above is the final retouched photo. Looking good!

Needless to say, I set my camera, lights, and reflectors exactly the same on both days in order to keep things as consistent as possible.

Attire

Giving everyone general attire guidelines is another great way to keep things looking consistent from headshot to headshot. This works not matter how formal or casual the company vibe is. Everyone at Summit Learning Charter was notified before picture day to wear darker colors, including blues, which makes sense because those are the tones of their company shirts. The result was a unifying look while still letting everyone showcase their individuality.

BTW, I created an entire blog post just about what to wear for headshots, so check that post out if you want to read more on this topic.

Background

As I mentioned above, this job required shooting at two completely different locations. This meant using an environmental background was out of the question if they wanted things to match up perfectly. What to do?

A pure white background will never go out of style. Summit Learning Charter made a good choice by deciding on this for a background because it will be easy to match in the future if any new headshots need to be done. It also just keeps things simple. An environmental background can look really cool, but it’s tricky because it can easily get too busy and compete for visual attention.

Here’s one more look at my setup while I was getting my lighting dialed in:

Behind the scenes to show my headshot lighting setup Me holding a white balance target (gray card)

Day 1: Above, I’m looking like a dork while making sure there’s enough room around my light stands for people to hold the reflector. I always try to put myself in the position of the subject before asking someone to get in front of my camera. Day 2: Also above, I’m photographing myself while holding a grey card. This ensured I would have a good neutral target to color-balance the photos.

Conclusion

So there you have it. While keeping these three things in mind, I was able to create 40 headshots with a very consistent look and feel for Summit Learning Charter. This was a fairly big job for me, but things ran really smoothly overall. I credit this to having a well-tested and nimble gear setup. I also credit this to the help I got with staff scheduling. In the end, I’m very happy with the results!

I want to thank Summit Learning Charter for having me do their headshots.

-Chris