Articles / July 14, 2026

How to run a headshot day for 60 people without losing the afternoon

By Anthony Jenkins, founder — 6 minute read

Sixty headshots takes four to five hours with one setup and a tight roster: three to four minutes per person plus a short buffer each hour. At our published rate of $95 per person for on-site days of 60 people or fewer, that's a $5,700 line item that replaces sixty individual studio appointments nobody would ever schedule.

The photography is the easy part. Headshot days succeed or fail on logistics, and the logistics are all decided before we arrive. Here is exactly how we run them.

The schedule math

Plan on 12 to 15 people per hour. Each person needs about three minutes in front of the camera: a posture reset, six to ten frames, and a quick look at the back of the camera so they leave confident instead of anxious. The rest of the hourly budget absorbs the person who needs a blazer swap and the director who shows up eight minutes late.

Batch people by department, not alphabetically. Teams walk over together, wait together, and go back to work together, so each interruption hits one part of the org once instead of hitting every team all day.

The space

We need surprisingly little: a 10-by-15-foot area, one power outlet, and ceiling height of eight feet or more. A corner of a conference room works. What matters more is placement: put the setup near a break area or elevator bank so walking over costs people ninety seconds, not ten minutes. We bring backgrounds (white, charcoal, or we shoot environmental against your space), lighting, and a tethered preview station.

One look, including the person who joins in October

The reason to bring the photographer on-site instead of collecting sixty selfie-wall submissions is consistency: same lighting, same background, same crop, across the entire leadership page. Ask your photographer how they handle late joiners. We record the lighting setup for every headshot day, so the person hired three months later matches the wall. That detail is the difference between a team page and a collage.

What to tell your people to wear

One paragraph in the calendar invite covers it: solid colors over busy patterns, mid-tones over pure white or pure black, long sleeves photograph better than short, and bring the jacket even if you don't wear it, since it takes ten seconds to try both. Glasses are fine; we angle the lights to cut the glare.

The roster

Send a shared sheet with five-minute slots and let people claim their own. Self-selection cuts no-shows roughly in half compared to assigned times. Leave the last slot of each hour empty as a floater for reschedules, and name one internal point person who can go pull the next department when a slot opens early. That one person is worth more to the schedule than anything we do.

Delivery

Everyone's selects are retouched and delivered within 48 hours, in web and print sizes. Insist on a stated turnaround from whoever you hire. A headshot day that delivers in six weeks quietly defeats the reason you booked it, which is usually a website launch, a funding announcement, or a conference deadline with a date on it.