The brief
Thirty people, spread across six cities, need to end up on one website grid looking like they were shot by the same person on the same afternoon. They weren’t. The company has four to six weeks before the new site goes live, and someone in HR has to defend the invoice to a finance director who has never heard of a colour profile. That’s the brief I am holding against every option below.
It sounds like a scheduling problem. It is mostly a lens and light problem, and the two get confused constantly. Solve the second one and the first one gets much easier to defend.
Six ways to do it
Six routes get pitched for a brief like this, and only two of them hold up past the first ten headshots. Below is what each one costs against thirty people, with travel and hotels included where they apply.
| Approach | Cost for 30 people | How consistent it looks | Time to complete | When I would pick it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fly everyone to one London day | £3,500–£7,000, plus a lost work day per person | Very high: one room, one backdrop, one photographer | 4–6 weeks to book flights and diaries, one day to shoot | An all-hands is already happening and the flights are booked anyway |
| Run two or three regional days | £1,800–£2,700, including my travel and one hotel night per city | High: same kit and backdrop, different rooms | 4–6 weeks | The team clusters around two or three hubs |
| Brief local photographers to a written spec | £4,500–£7,500 across 30 sittings, no travel | Medium: depends entirely on how closely the spec is followed | 4–6 weeks, mostly waiting on 30 separate diaries | Nobody is within a day’s travel of anyone else |
| Send one photographer round the country | £4,200–£5,400 including travel and hotels for six stops | High, close to the single-day option | 6–8 weeks touring six cities | Each city has six or more people, worth a dedicated stop |
| Generate AI headshots | £300–£1,200 for the set | Consistent from a distance, odd up close | Days, not weeks | Interim images while the real shoot gets organised |
| Phones plus a guide and heavy editing | £240–£750 in retouching alone | Lowest: phone lenses distort a face at arm’s length | About a week if everyone cooperates | The budget is genuinely nothing and something is better than an empty grid |
I’d pick the regional days for most thirty-person briefs. One London day is cheaper on paper, but it assumes a team that gathers anyway, and few remote companies do.
The spec sheet that makes strangers match
This is the part worth keeping. Send this list to a photographer in Leeds or Cardiff and the file that comes back will sit next to the London set without a flinch.
- Background: mid grey, roughly 18% grey card value, lit to the same brightness as the subject, not darker.
- Lens and distance: 85mm equivalent, subject three to four metres from the background, camera about two metres from the subject.
- Crop: head and shoulders, eyes one third down from the top of the frame, a little air above the head.
- Catchlight: a single soft light slightly above and left of the lens, so every face has the same small white dot in the same place.
- Aperture: f/5.6 to f/8, enough depth that both ears stay sharp.
- Colour profile: sRGB, daylight-balanced flash, no mixed light sources in frame.
- File naming: surname, city, sitting date.
- Retouching: light skin clean-up only, no reshaping, no whitening teeth beyond natural.
Give a photographer that list and one reference photo and they need no other briefing. Most come back and ask nothing further.
What will still not match, and how the edit fixes it
Even with the spec followed to the letter, colour temperature drifts between rooms. A north-facing window in one office, a fluorescent strip in another. Contrast varies with whoever’s flash unit is older. The background never reads as exactly the same grey twice, whatever the card says.
None of that is a disaster. I batch-process the whole set at the end, matching white balance, contrast and background value file by file. It takes about half an hour for thirty images once the raw files land, which is why I ask for raw files rather than finished JPEGs from anyone else on the team.
What can’t be fixed afterwards is focal length. A face shot on a 35mm up close looks different from the same face on an 85mm from further back: flatter cheekbones, a wider nose, a subtly different person. Get the lens wrong on the day and no edit brings it back, however long I spend on it.
Running the London days
I run headshot photography from £150 a sitting, and on a company day that becomes fifteen-minute slots back to back. Eight to twelve people an hour is realistic if everyone turns up on time and nobody needs three outfit changes: see how many headshots fit in an hour for the full breakdown by group size.
The booking sheet
A shared booking sheet with named slots beats a sign-up link every time. Someone always double-books, and someone always forgets entirely. Book the meeting room from 08:30, not 09:00: the first slot always runs late while the mirror gets moved and the light gets checked. Bring a spare white shirt and a spare navy one for the door.
On a thirty-person day, four people will not show. That’s not pessimism. It is every corporate day I have shot in the last five years, and I build the schedule around it rather than pretending otherwise.
Adding office frames to the same day
Most companies ask for a handful of office and team shots once the headshot rig is up. That is corporate photography from £250 on top, and it is worth doing while the flash is already set: the light does not need resetting for a few wider frames of the same room.
Practical London points worth knowing: lift access matters more than square footage in a period conversion near Old Street, kit travels fine on the Central line but not with a tripod bag at rush hour, and a shoot booked for late September loses useful daylight by 7pm if the meeting room has one window.
What it costs, and the delivery
An individual sitting is £150 to £250: thirty minutes, two looks, three retouched images. A half day on site, up to fifteen people, runs £450 to £650. A full day, up to thirty people, is £750 to £950. Travel beyond Zone 3 adds £30. None of those floors move, whatever the head count: see what a headshot costs in London if the figures look high against a freelancer’s day rate.
Files land within 48 hours of each shoot day. For a six-city rollout run as three regional days, the last set of files can reach the design team inside five weeks of the first booking, assuming diaries cooperate on the dates.
AI headshots fail on exactly one thing
Not the obvious complaint. Skin no longer looks plastic, and the lighting is often better than what comes out of a badly lit spare room at home. Where it falls over is ears, glasses and hands resting on a chair back: anything the model has to invent rather than copy from a real photograph.
Look closely at a set of thirty AI headshots and two or three will have an earring in the wrong place or glasses that do not quite sit on the nose. For a team that needs something on the website next week, that makes it a reasonable stopgap.
I’d use AI headshots for a new starter between shoot days, not as the permanent set for thirty people who will be on the same page for the next three years.
Send me your head count and cities and I will reply within one working day with a shoot plan and a price for this brief. Tell me the deadline too, and I will build the schedule backwards from it.