The Brief – 38 corporate headshot portraits with personality

Out of hours emergency veterinary care specialists, ‘Vets Now‘, have raised the bar when it comes to pet care. Their new pet accident and emergency hospital in Manchester is a marvel of modern medical technology, stylish interior design and is staffed by a team extremely caring Vets, Nurses and  support staff, who all absolutely love animals. Capturing a great portrait of these wonderful people to display on their website to show pet owners the hospital, not only has state of the art facilities, but is staffed by people who genuinely care about animals was paramount.

Non of the people in these portraits like having their picture taken

Vets Now, commissioned Neilson Reeves Photography to shoot these portraits because we know how to capture personality and make corporate photography fun. We understand people don’t like having their photograph taken and have developed our 10 minute headshot system you can read about in next section.

Thank you again for getting the staff so excited and happy about doing something they were all so reluctant to do initially! The transformation from going into the room to coming out was quite remarkable! 

How we get winning expressions and happy subjects on every shoot

Our corporate photography packages and pricing structure has been designed to allow us to spend enough time with each person we photograph to get the best results. Over the last 10 years shooting corporate photography, we’ve developed a really efficient 10 minute per headshot process that results in great portraits and happy people:

1. Introduce, explain, enquire about likes, dislikes, relax and find common ground
2. Study facial shape and form, light each person as an individual finding the best light for them.
3. Take some pictures and show results – this step has an amazing effect and starts to build trust and confidence
4. A much more confident person now gives feedback and we make amends to lighting etc
5. Continue shooting and showing until we shoot a portrait you are happy with

This process has resulted in us being one of the most in demand headshot and portrait companies for actors and business people in the UK and 100’s of customer reviews across Google, Facebook and LinkedIn. Plus this managed process allows customers to plan and budget their shoot by simply multiplying the number of people they need photographing by 10 minutes, add in 20 minutes for us to set up photography studio on your site and then choose one of our time on site packages here

About the shoot and costs

The marketing department at ‘Vets Now’ initially chose our 6 hour £650 package with a view to getting 34-38 Vets, Nurses and support staff on site on the same day allowing us to shoot back to back in 10 minute slots. In theory this sounds relatively easy but as ‘Vets Now’, and many companies trying to organise corporate shoots find, it’s not always possible to get busy professionals, many of whom can earn company they work for many hundreds of pounds per hour, all on site together.

How the flexibility of our pricing benefited Vets Now when things changed

On the day of the shoot, through no fault of ‘Vets Now’ marketing department, it was becoming clear that half of the people would not be able to attend the shoot and we ended up shooting 20 corporate in 4 hours. Many other photography companies would invoice ‘Vets Now’ for the package they originally booked, but at Neilson Reeves we understand how challenging it can be for companies organising busy people so we allow customers to change or amend a package at anytime. In this case we happily moved ‘Vets Now’ down to our 20 headshot 4 hour package, with a big discount as they’d now booked 2 sessions. We then arranged another day to come back in setup the studio and shoot the remaining 18 corporate headshot portraits.

How our added value service helped Vets Now

To be honest we have a vested interested in offering all our clients these added value service free of charge and here’s why