How to Refresh Your Executive Team Headshots

BigPanda, an enterprise AI software company in Redwood City, needed to refresh the headshots on their executive leadership page. Their head of corporate marketing sent me a creative brief with a line I have thought about ever since: they wanted editorial confidence, not corporate compliance, and individual personality over a branded wall of blue button-downs.

That is the clearest description I have read of what separates a good leadership page from a forgettable one. Here is how we shot it.

Building the CEO portrait out of a waiting room

The CEO needed something distinct from the rest of the team, and the space I had to work with was an ordinary corporate waiting area. What it did have was the company logo on the wall.

So I moved the furniture out of the way and set two lights with umbrellas. One went on the wall, aimed directly at the logo, gelled blue to match BigPanda’s brand color. The second lit the CEO himself, keeping him clean and separated from that blue field behind him. The result reads like a set built for the shot, not a lobby I rearranged twenty minutes earlier. That is usually the job: find the one usable element in an unremarkable room and build around it.

Two looks for the CEO, one consistent look for the team

For the CEO we shot two distinct looks: the blue logo portrait above, and a second setup matching the rest of the leadership team. The CEO’s photo works harder than anyone else’s. It runs next to funding announcements, in press kits, and on conference bios, so having both a branded signature image and a versatile standard one covers every use without a reshoot.

The rest of the leadership team got one carefully consistent look. On a team page, consistency is the whole game: same light, same crop logic, same background treatment, so the grid reads as one company rather than a collection of individual photos taken in different decades.

Why the background is a blurred park, not a backdrop

A seamless backdrop is the right call for a lot of corporate work. It was the wrong call here, because a gray sweep is exactly the compliance look the brief was pushing against.

Next to the office there was an open park area with good separation between the subject position and the trees behind it. Shooting there, wide open, threw the background into soft color and light while keeping every portrait consistent with the others. The team reads as a group without looking stamped out of the same machine, and the images have air in them, which matters on a web page where the portraits sit in a grid.

How they found me

One detail I like about this project: BigPanda found me by asking Claude for a photographer in Redwood City. An enterprise AI company discovered their photographer through an AI assistant. Their head of marketing mentioned it in the first email, and it is a small sign of how much has changed about the way companies find the people they hire.

What this kind of shoot involves

A leadership team refresh like this runs as a half day on location, about fifteen minutes per executive, timed around a day when the team is already together. I bring the full studio: lights, modifiers, backdrop options if we need them, and instant review so nobody leaves wondering how they looked. Delivery is a curated, retouched gallery, and selects can come back fast when a page relaunch is waiting on them.

If your leadership page needs the same treatment, see executive headshots and portrait sessions or read the difference between a headshot session and an executive portrait session. For a full team, the corporate headshots page covers how headshot days work, and the headshot day planner gives you timing and pricing before you book.