Corporate Photography Prices.

Corporate Photography Prices. This has always been a tricky one for any corporate photographer or any type photographer, how much should you charge?

I certainly do not have the correct answer but I can review my experiences with clients and other corporate photographer prices over many years. When we used to still shot on film and deliver prints you had a product to mark up and you could add a reasonable day rate onto your invoice after you had taken into account studio costs or location travel. With the advent of digital things became a little less structured and the need for large studios reduced and digital images to not have any physical day to day costs. So where do you base your corporate photography prices on? You have your basic overheads, kit, car, studio hire etc and after those it is what kind of profit you need to further build your business and create the lifestyle you require. But the one thing controlling your profits is what clients will pay for your services. Most companies and individuals when needing corporate photography will get quotes in from at least a few photographers who like the look of their work. Prices will not be the only factor but it will be a major factor. Style of photography, communicating the service, availability and timescales all factor into their decision on who they will hire as their corporate photographer.

You can look at the market place and what other corporate photographers are charging. Some put fees and rates on their website but the majority do not. We have been asked by young photographers what they should charge. We have been contacted by other photographers under the pretence that they were a client and need to know costs for a commission. We have even had an email from another corporate photographer in London telling us that we were under charging on a commission and that we should increase our fees and to stop under cutting the market.

We think that when you sit down to set your corporate photography prices you have to decide what you need to earn survive and then you have your basic prices. After this it really comes down to wether you want to drive a new Rolls Royce or a ten year old second hand car. As with most things in business its a learning curve and offering discounts in poor economic times and making hay while the sun shines is all common sense and as your business hopefully grows you get to know what your photography clients will feel happy with.

You can follow these suggested corporate photography freelance rates but I am not sure how high or low budget corporate photography would differ and I can be sure all our clients would choose low budget please but high standard.

Corporate Portrait Photography with Blurred Backgrounds in London Offices.

It can often be assumed that corporate portraits and headshots need to be taken with a white background. Most clients that get in touch with us will book us to come along to their offices and ask if we can bring a background as their offices are not that modern or fitted out poorly. We often would turn at their building and notice that if we captured their corporate headshots without a background we could utilise their offices by shooting the headshots on a long lens and blurred the background by having a narrow depth of field and therefore having the background out of focus. The more we did this for clients the better you become at seeing the possibilities in the colours and shapes that are created when you capture headshots this way.

Shooting images with intentional blurring caused by having areas out of focus is called Bokeh by the Japanese and as you practise this you see how colours and shapes can be adapted by the amounts of blur and exposure you employ.

The headshot below was taken in a very plain office and we blurred the background and used the light coming from the window to create the soft graduated grey effects.

The above headshot we used the blue cladding on a office building across the street and a interesting and original background.

The above was taken at office on Victoria Street and we used the corner of the window and blurred the office blinds and allowed some blue sky to come through.

Here we used a tree lined street as the background and the green from the trees creating a dappled effect and we under exposed the background.

The above was captured in a very basic one room office but the blurred effect work really well to cover over and unsightly area of the office.

Photography © Corporate Photography London.

Corporate Photography Website Design

In our last post we wrote about putting video onto our new website and now we are having to look at how we should design the site. We have plenty of help from our website designers and programmers who are a great bunch of people but we have to set out what we require from them to do what they do.

When we first set up the site with WordPress we looked at what other photographers were putting together for their portfolios and noticed that wedding photographers were a few steps ahead of what commercial photographers were doing. We really like the work and website of wedding photographers Jacob and Pauline which is beautifully designed and the content flows well. Also we were impressed by the photography and website design of Andrew Prokos who had a lot of content and information on his site but managed to keep it looking simple and easy to navigate.

In the end we settled on a design which was taken from a news item which we found on the BBC website Although this had nothing to do with photography as the subject we really were impressed by the design of the pages and how large amounts of imagery and content were easily navigated and information imparted in a simple way. Being able to navigate the entire site by simply scrolling is something we are big fans of and will be moving our site forward with large icon images for each of our corporate photography services and with the smaller scroll strip containing further examples and information about what we offer clients in London.

Above is our design for our corporate photography London page with a scrolling strip showing varies styles of our location corporate images with content explaining what we offer.

Here is our corporate event photography design again with a full page image and further samples scrolling down.

Lastly we have a corporate video page with live action clips and a scrolling strip moving up and down depending if you want to read the text or watch the video content.

Corporate Video on Photography Website

How we decided to run a corporate video on our London photography website homepage.

We are in the process of revamping our website and our web designers came up with a suggestion to have a video on our homepage showing how we supply our corporate headshot photography services in London.

Although we shoot video for our clients a large percentage of our work is still photography and it felt a little uneasy not have still photographs on our homepage. We decided to put together a video featuring our photographers working with clients in their offices. We also shot some City footage to give the video a sense of location and to show we travel to different areas of London.

We kept the video fairly short as it was to be a quick introduction to our services and was going to be looped on our homepage. We are pleased with the outcome and will be adding it to our website in the near future.

Corporate Photographers London from Corporate Photography London

Our only other dilemma was that we had to feature our corporate video services on our site and we did not feel the homepage video was suitable to illustrate this as although it was video it featured us being still photographers.

In the end we put together footage we had shot for clients over recent years and made this our corporate video section on the revamped website. This needed to be more generic footage of meetings, clients talking to camera, graphics we have added to video, corporate offices in use, clients being interviewed, close ups of office working environment and corporate events.

With the advent of professional DSLRs we have the ability to capture good website quality video in tandem with still photography. We have seen clients adding more video to their websites as the cost of commissioning the services is becoming more affordable and easier to show.

Corporate Video in London from Corporate Photography London

Please get in touch if you need any further information about our corporate video and London photography.

Corporate Headshot with London Office Background

We posted before about adding different background to a corporate headshot in post production. I thought this would be a good point to show how popular this service has become as clients often require the office backgrounds in their headshots but for various reasons do not want to have the shoot take place in their offices. In these instances we capture the headshots at our Beech Street studio and then add a new background in post production. We give clients wide selection to see which they prefer and how the headshot works best taking into account light and colour balance.

These are a recent shoot and you can see how we have blended headshots and backgrounds to try and make the photograph look natural and also fresh and contemporary.

Out of these eight I prefer the last two corporate headshots as the backgrounds seem to compliment the client. The image 7 with the greenish tint gives the portrait a softer feel and image 8 is a stronger portrait with the backdrop bolder and with diagonal elements.

Moving on we captures some office style corporate portraits for the same client and then again added a selection of different backgrounds. To achieve this we found that the wider the portrait the harder it was to add the correct backgrounds.

Out of the four above we feel that the second image works best as a deeper and more 3D background has a beneficial effect on the corporate portrait. The other 3 styles although perfectly acceptable do not have the same quality which creates less of an interest for the viewer.

Lastly we worked on some much wider photographs for the client and with these we found that these worked with with backgrounds that have elements of perspective in them and showed more detail in them ie more realistic images of London offices and views through windows.

We feel that all four of these work and interestingly they are all very different in content but have good strong visual impact which really benefits the corporate portrait and makes it much better than a simple white background.

If you are interested please get in touch or connect on our corporate photographer London page on LinkedIn.