Cotswold Brand Photography | Brookman Greene

ONE WEEK, ONE TEAM, ONE CHANCE TO GET IT RIGHT

When Jodie was coming over from Canada for the first time in 3 years, we had about a week when the Brookman Greene team would all be in the same country.

That immediately made the photography rather more important.

As a Creative Partnership client, I'd already got a very clear brief about what they needed from their imagery. The initial request sounded straightforward enough: while everybody was together, let's update the team headshots for the website.

And we absolutely could have done that. But it felt like a fairly spectacular waste of an opportunity.

THE PROBLEM WITH “JUST A HEADSHOT'“

There is nothing wrong with a good headshot. I believe every founder or member of staff in a business needs a clean headshot showing who's who.

But if you've gone to the trouble of getting an entire team together — particularly when one of them lives halfway round the world— creating six photographs that can essentially only be used on the About page doesn't give you an awful lot back from that opportunity.

So I questioned them about widening the brief.

We still photographed the clean individual headshots they needed, but we also thought about what each person actually did within the business and how we could communicate that visually. A picture tells a thousand words, right?!!

That meant 'in situ' photographs as well as portraits: people with the materials, tools, spaces and details that made sense for their roles. We planned the different team combinations needed across the businesses too, so that while everybody was there, we captured as many genuinely useful variations as possible.

CONSISTENCY MATTERED TOO

We had originally talked about updating some of the team photography earlier in the year. Waiting until everybody could be photographed together turned out to be much more useful.

The same location, lighting, backdrop and photographic treatment gave the finished library a consistency that is very difficult to achieve when team photographs are added piecemeal, or worse still by different photographers with different editing styles, over several months.

That's one of those details that can seem fairly insignificant until the photographs sit together on a website. Then it matters enormously.

THIS IS WHERE PLANNING EARNS ITS KEEP

The camera work was only one part of this shoot. The more valuable question beforehand was: given that we have everybody here, what can we create now that the business is likely to need over the coming months?

That's a very different starting point from simply fulfilling a request for six headshots.

It's also one of the reasons I love working with Creative Partner businesses on an ongoing basis. I know what's already in their image library. I know what we've photographed before. I understand what's changing within the business and we can plan ahead rather than waiting until somebody suddenly realises they need an image that doesn't exist.

Jodie went back to Canada.

But instead of one new headshot each, the team were left with a much broader, more consistent library that can work across their websites, social media, PR and marketing.

A much better use of one very small window.

Venetia x