Why Do An Office Lifestyle Photo Shoot?
What’s the point of doing office lifestyle photos? To attract the best talent, help showcase your workplace and show your employees that you value them representing your business to the outside world.
It’s been a while since I posted on this blog, but I’ve been nice and busy with a good selection of work ranging from events and headshots to office lifestyle photography. It’s office lifestyle photography that I’m here to write about today, with some examples from the past year.
Office lifestyle photography is about showing off the reality of a business and its people – a world of collaboration, little meetings and catchups. It's not just about showing what people do, but how they do it, capturing the energy, personality, and culture that make each workplace unique.
You can go about it in two ways:
Unposed documentary photos using available light.
Posed and set up photos using artificial light.
I have a whole blog post that goes into more detail about office lifestyle photography and the differences between the two here.
Why do people need office lifestyle photos? In today's competitive recruitment market, companies are looking for ways to stand out. Attract the best people? Boost employee morale? Showcase your company culture? Office lifestyle photography can help with all of that.
Attracting talent: Show potential employees what it's really like to work at your company. Do you have a ping pong table and foosball tournament? What other little things do people do in your workplace that they enjoy?
Boosting employee morale: Sharing photos of employees in action, collaborating, and having fun can help foster a sense of community and belonging. It shows employees that they're valued and let’s be honest, it’s fun taking part in a photo shoot because it’s different from your day-to-day work.
Showcasing company culture: Whether you're a young startup or a more formal corporate business, your company culture is what sets you apart. Photography can help show your values, your personality, and what makes your workplace different from others.
I love taking these kind of photos, whether posed or just pure documentary style. I’m always happy to discuss with you what would suit your business best.
After these kind of shoots, I upload the proofs (unedited photos) to a private online gallery from which you can choose your favourite shots. I then just edit those photos to make them look as great as them can, before sending them over to you as high resolution JPEGs using another online gallery.
If and when you’re interested in discussing your photography project, please do get in touch using my contact form. I look forward to hearing from you.
Back To Work: Corporate Headshots, Events, Office Lifestyle
2022 and it’s back to work with a bang after two years of the pandemic.
It will be of no surprise to you that the Covid-19 pandemic had a serious negative effect on my business as a corporate photographer in London. My job has always been reliant on people being at work in offices, so the lockdowns were not good for business. But there were little bits of work, here and there, which helped me make it through, and I’ve come out the other side of the pandemic with all guns blazing. It’s been a super busy year so far, dominated by headshots but with an increasing number of corporate events happening again since the easing of restrictions.
It was such a great relief to be busy again, visiting my clients’ offices to shoot an enormous number of headshots because so many people have changed jobs in the last two years. I’ve met loads and loads of people doing that, and I’ve been really enjoying getting back into the swing of things. Events have come back into full force, and I’ve been loving getting creative again to help my clients’ events look outstanding.
Probably the best thing to come out of the pandemic is the new approach to working that the majority of businesses and society have adopted. Businesses realised that many employees are more productive when they work at home because there are fewer distractions. Less time is wasted commuting back and forth to the office each day, less time is used up moving between meetings because they are all lined up back to back on Zoom or Teams.
But people really missed being in the office; the atmosphere, the company, the interaction and environment. There are some meetings and work that are best done face to face, in the flesh. It’s the interaction and atmosphere in the office that often attracts people to work for a particular business. So office lifestyle photography is as important as ever; photos and imagery that showcases what it’s like to work for an organisation.
It’s so good to be busy again in London taking photos of events and people again. Here is a selection of some of my favourite images since the pandemic eased towards the end of 2021.
Office Documentary vs Office Lifestyle Photography
What’s the difference between office lifestyle photography and office documentary photography?
In the last little while, I have had various enquiries from people asking for me to take photos of people at work in their office. I love doing this kind of work, but I found myself, a few times, repeating a similar explanation, which is the difference between documentary photography and lifestyle photography.
Office Documentary Photography
Documentary photography, in its purest sense, is photography that captures the truest sense of what is happening. Nothing is posed or set up. It simply involves me wandering around an office with my camera, capturing what I see happening in the most creative way I can. If there is lots of activity in the office, that will show in the photos, but if people are just sat at their desks tapping away at a key, then the photos perhaps won’t look terribly dynamic. The other challenge with office documentary photos is that of light. Office lighting is often not very flattering, unless the office is filled with plenty of natural light.
Office Lifestyle Photography
Office lifestyle photography is a slower and deliberate process, where each shot, or series of shots, is planned out a little and lit with proper lighting. For example, we might set up a shot where two people are having an informal meeting in a breakout area, and we will light it so that the people look great, and then I will snap a series of images of that meeting. We might do the same thing with a slightly large group of 3 or 4 people in a meeting room. These photos take a little longer to set up because of the lighting, and they require willing participants from the client’s team, which isn’t always easy. The upshot is that they look more professional and slick than office documentary photos which are a little more ‘raw’.
Documentary or Lifestyle Photography: What’s Right For Us?
So what is the right approach for your business? I would suggest you make a decision based on what kind of image you want to portray. There may be different uses for both types of photography. For example, office lifestyle photos might be best for the career section of your website or even the homepage, whereas office documentary photos may work well for social media or other comms channels your business uses. Have a look at some of the examples above to help inform your decision, and hit the contact button above to get in touch if you’d like to ask for a quote or to discuss your requirements.