Behind the Lens: A Cambridge Tech Startup Headshot Day

Behind the Lens: A Cambridge Tech Startup Headshot Day

Luminance AI had a problem that many Cambridge tech startups have: the team had grown from four people to twenty-three in under eighteen months, everyone's LinkedIn profile photo had been taken at different times on different devices, and the company was preparing for a Series A fundraising round that would put their website in front of institutional investors for the first time.

Their Head of People contacted me to organise a full company headshot day at their office in the Cambridge Science Park. Twenty-three people. One day. A consistent, professional, brand-appropriate set of headshots for the entire team.

Setting Up the Studio

Company headshot days require a different setup than individual portrait sessions. The priority is efficiency and consistency: the same light, the same distance, the same crop, the same background for every subject, regardless of their height, their colouring, or how comfortable they are in front of a camera.

I arrived at the Science Park at 8:30am. By 9am, the temporary studio was set: two Profoto lights with a large softbox as the key and a strip light for separation, a mid-grey seamless background, a fixed camera position on a tripod. The setup takes about 45 minutes. Once it is done, the photography is the easy part.

The People Part

The hardest part of a corporate headshot day is not the photography; it is managing twenty-three people who all have varying comfort levels with being photographed, varying ideas of what they look like versus what they want to look like, and varying amounts of spare time to give to a photo session in the middle of a working day.

The approach is to keep each individual session short — maximum ten minutes — and to create a relaxed atmosphere quickly. Most people visibly relax after the first three frames when I turn the screen toward them and they see that the photographs already look professional. The conversation about what they do at the company helps.

The Delivery

The full gallery of 23 individually edited headshots was delivered within 48 hours. Luminance AI used them across their website relaunch, their investor deck, and the team's individual LinkedIn profiles. Three months later, I received an email saying they had closed the funding round.