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The New York Post hired Bay Area photographer Josh Edelson to make editorial portraits of California gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton. A behind-the-scenes look at the assignment.
Behind the scenes photographing three AWS engineers inside an active Cupertino data center for WIRED and Amazon — the lighting, lens, and environmental-portrait approach in a tight server room.
Commencement is the single most-photographed day of a university’s year. Press will run a picture. Families will share dozens. Marketing will pull frames for the next year’s recruitment campaign. The photographer who lands all three audiences is doing real institutional work — and the photographer who doesn’t quietly costs the comms team a year of friction. Here’s what universities should actually look for when hiring a commencement photographer, from a working San Francisco photographer who shot UC Law SF’s 2026 commencement. 1. Low-light auditorium experience — non-negotiable Commencement venues are punishing. Stage spots wash out faces. House lights are dimmer than they look. The mixed color temperature between stage and audience kills automatic white balance. The photographer who hasn’t done auditorium work before will deliver muddy, color-shifted frames — and you won’t know until the gallery arrives. Ask specifically: can I see a full commencement gallery from a low-lit auditorium venue? Not portfolio highlights — a full gallery. The middle 80% of the frames is where the answer lives. 2. Editorial vs portrait style — make sure you’re hiring the right one Most photographers in the corporate space come from a wedding or portrait background. Their instinct is to slow the moment down and pose it. That works for the cocktail reception after the ceremony — it does not work for the diploma hand-off, the speaker on stage, or the family reaction in the third row. For commencement, you want a photographer with editorial or news training: someone who works fast, unobtrusively, and reads the moment before it happens. Ask if their work has appeared in editorial outlets. 3. Same-day delivery for the press release Your communications team has a press release going out within hours. The press cycle for university news is fast. You need a tight select edit — 20 to 40 strong frames including the stage moments, the headline graduate, and a posed shot of the platform party — within hours of the ceremony ending. Ask the photographer flatly: will you deliver a select edit the day of? If the answer is anything other than yes, you don’t have the right photographer for commencement work. 4. Coverage breadth — all the audiences at once Commencement has at least four distinct audiences: press (wants the wide, the headline graduate, the speaker), marketing (wants the recruitment brochure shot — graduates in regalia against the brand-defining backdrop), families (want the candid moment when their graduate crossed), and the dean’s office (wants the platform party portrait and the formal speaker shots). One photographer should produce coverage for all four in a single day. Ask for the breakdown in advance. 5. Editorial polish in the final delivery The final gallery should look like editorial work — natural skin tones, consistent color, considered crops, no over-saturated school-brochure look. This is the difference between a commencement gallery that runs in the local paper or gets picked up by the AP, and one that sits in a Dropbox folder. Editorial polish is also what makes the imagery still useful three years later when marketing pulls a frame for the strategic plan deck. What doesn’t matter as much as people think Number of years in business (a photographer who shoots two commencements a year for 20 years has less relevant experience than someone who shoots 10 corporate events with similar conditions). Whether they’ve shot your specific university before (preferable, but not necessary). The number of photographers they bring (for most commencements, one shooter is fine — two is needed for multi-track ceremonies). Don’t overweight the things that look like signals but aren’t. Questions worth asking on the intro call Can I see a full commencement or auditorium gallery, not just highlights? · What’s your same-day select-edit turnaround? · What’s your approach to mixed-light auditorium venues? · How do you handle the platform party portrait alongside the candid coverage? · What does the final delivery look like — file types, gallery platform, usage rights? Related: San Francisco University Commencement Photographer · UC Law SF 2026 Commencement Coverage · Corporate Events · Get in touch
The single biggest variable in how your event photography turns out is the brief. Not the photographer — most working professionals can hit a brief — and not the equipment. The brief. Here’s what a working San Francisco corporate event photographer wants to know before walking in. The five things every event photographer brief should include 1. The must-have shot list. 8 to 15 specific shots. Keynote at the podium. Wide of the room from the back. Audience reaction during the Q&A. Posed shot of the board. The networking moment with the partner logo wall in frame. List them. Specifically. 2. The schedule with timestamps. When does the keynote start. When are breakouts. When do the executives walk in. When is the photo of the partner companies happening. A schedule with photographer-relevant timestamps is worth more than 10 minutes of verbal explanation. 3. The day-of point of contact. One person on the client side whose phone the photographer can call mid-event. Not three people. One. 4. Delivery expectations. Same-day select edits for press? Two-day social-ready batch? Full gallery in 5 business days? Aspect ratios needed — landscape for the website, square for Instagram, vertical for stories? 5. The “do not photograph” list. Confidential slides, specific employees who don’t want to be photographed, partner companies with NDA constraints. Make this explicit upfront. What to leave OUT of the brief Don’t over-direct the editorial style. “Make it look like AFP” or “make it look like Getty” is a useful reference — “make sure everyone is smiling and the lighting is bright” is the kind of direction that produces stock photos. Trust the photographer to read the room. The brief is for logistics; the photographer’s job is the eye. Brief structure that works in practice Five sections, kept tight: event overview (2 sentences), schedule with timestamps, must-have shot list, delivery expectations, day-of contact info. A photographer should be able to read the whole brief in two minutes and know exactly what they’re walking into. The pre-event call A 20-minute call the week before is worth its weight in gold. It surfaces the things that aren’t in the brief — the executives who hate being photographed, the partner whose CEO is flying in last-minute, the surprise announcement on the keynote stage. Most working photographers will offer this call. Take it. After the event Two things make the photographer’s job easier on follow-up: fast feedback on the select edit (within 24 hours) and clear ownership of the final gallery (one person who decides what goes where). The faster these happen, the faster the photographer can move into the polished final delivery. Related: San Francisco Event Photography · Conference Photography · Corporate Gala Photography · Get in touch
Most corporate conferences are photographed by someone who shoots weddings on weekends. Sometimes that works. Often it doesn’t. Here’s what to look for if your conference photography is going to do real marketing and PR work afterward. The five things that actually matter 1. Editorial experience. The best conference photographers come from a news or editorial background. They know how to find the genuine moment, work fast under pressure, and read a room without slowing it down. Wedding photographers can be excellent — but the discipline is different. Ask if their work has appeared in editorial outlets (TIME, WSJ, Bloomberg, AFP, Getty). 2. Low-light competence. Conference rooms are dark. Stage lights are uneven. The photographer needs to handle ISO 6400+, mixed lighting (LED panels + tungsten + window light), and silent shutter operation during keynotes. Ask for sample frames specifically from low-lit rooms. 3. Multi-day stamina and consistency. Day-three coverage should look identical to day-one coverage. Same color grading, same crop preferences, same instincts for the candid. Ask to see a full multi-day conference gallery, not just a portfolio reel. 4. Delivery speed. Can they deliver select edits same-day for press? How fast is the full gallery — 3 days, 5 days, 7 days? For press-cycle work this is decisive. 5. Crew options. For multi-track conferences (two stages running simultaneously), you need a second photographer. Ask whether they have a vetted network of seconds or whether you’re scrambling to find one yourself. What doesn't matter as much as people think Camera brand. Anyone obsessing over Canon vs Sony vs Nikon is missing the point. Modern professional bodies all handle conference work fine. The eye is what matters. “Years of experience” alone. Twenty years of doing portraits in a strip mall doesn’t translate to conference work. Look at relevant experience — recent multi-day corporate conferences, ideally at scale. Price as a primary signal. Conference photography below $2,500 a day usually means someone is learning on your event. Above $10,000 a day usually means you’re paying for editorial credentials and crew — sometimes worth it for press-cycle work. The middle is where most working professionals sit. Questions worth asking on the intro call “Can I see a full conference gallery, not just a highlights reel?” “What’s your same-day select-edit turnaround?” “How do you handle multi-track conferences — second photographer, or single coverage?” “What does your delivery look like — file types, gallery platform, usage rights?” These four questions surface most of what matters. Red flags Watermarks on the final delivery. Bundled “rights packages” with restrictions on commercial use. A portfolio with no recent multi-day conference work. Unwillingness to do a pre-event call. Slow communication during the booking phase (will be slower during the event). The right photographer pays for themselves A conference photographer who hits the brief produces marketing assets your team will use for a year — annual report imagery, sponsor decks, next year’s landing page, recap newsletters, press follow-ups. A photographer who misses produces images you’ll quietly stop using by month two. The cost difference between great and adequate is usually a few thousand dollars; the asset-value difference is an order of magnitude. Related: San Francisco Conference Photography · How to Brief Your Event Photographer · San Francisco Event Photography · Get a quote
AI headshot tools — Aragon, HeadshotPro, Try It On AI, and a dozen others — flooded the market in 2024 and 2025 with the promise of “corporate-quality” portraits for $30 and twenty minutes of your time. The technology got remarkably good in a short period. So why are working corporate photographers busier than ever in 2026 — and why are recruiters and hiring managers increasingly skeptical of synthetic portraits? The AI headshot boom — and the backlash For about eighteen months, AI headshot services looked like an inevitability. Upload 10–20 selfies, pay $30–$50, get back a grid of “professional” portraits. The output got polished enough that most people who saw a single AI headshot in a vacuum couldn’t tell. The economic logic was unbeatable on price. What changed: recruiters, hiring managers, and audiences started seeing thousands of them. AI headshots have signature artifacts at scale — the same lighting, the same backgrounds, the same expressions, the same subtle uncanny-valley smoothness in the skin. Once you’ve seen 50, the next one is instantly recognizable. That recognition is bad. It tells a recruiter that the candidate either couldn’t afford a real headshot or didn’t think it was worth the effort — and both readings work against the candidate. How a real photographer’s headshot is different The differences are easy to see once you know to look. Real headshots have specific light direction, real bokeh, real skin texture, eye contact that’s earned through interaction rather than synthesized, and small natural asymmetries that AI training data smooths out. Hands, glasses, jewelry, and hair edges all look right — areas where AI still routinely produces tells. More importantly, a real session captures you. A good photographer talks to you, makes you laugh, gets you settled, and finds the frame where the version of you that earns trust at first glance shows up. That can’t be generated from selfies. When AI headshots are actually fine Honest answer: for very early-stage roles, for casual use, for a quick LinkedIn touch-up before a freelance pitch, AI tools can be fine. The bar for being acceptable on LinkedIn is not high, and AI clears it. The problem is when the bar matters. For executives, founders, attorneys, financial professionals, and anyone whose first impression carries real money — board roles, partner promotions, fundraising, sales above mid-six-figure deal sizes — the AI tell costs more than the savings. The same recruiters and decision-makers seeing your portrait are seeing dozens of synthetic ones each week. Real photography becomes the differentiator. The differentiator is going to grow, not shrink The market is moving in a clear direction. As AI portraits become more common, real photography becomes more valuable, not less — the same way handwritten thank-you notes got more powerful when email arrived. The differentiator widens with the AI boom, it doesn’t narrow. If your headshot is doing work that matters — earning trust with clients, opening doors with recruiters, holding up against C-suite peers — pay a real photographer once and let it work for you for three to five years. That’s the math. Related: San Francisco Corporate Headshots · San Francisco LinkedIn Headshots · San Francisco Executive Headshots · Get in touch
You’ve booked a corporate headshot session and you want to look like your best version of yourself when you sit down in front of the camera. Here’s a working photographer’s guide to preparing — the things that actually move the needle on how you’ll look in the final frame, distilled from running 90+ corporate headshot days at SF Bay Area companies over the past decade. Wardrobe: what to wear (and what to avoid) Solid, mid-saturation colors photograph best. Navy, charcoal, deep green, burgundy, cream — these read as professional without competing with your face. Avoid bright white shirts photographed against a white background (the camera can’t separate you from the backdrop) and pure black against a black backdrop for the same reason. Skip busy patterns. Tight stripes, herringbone, and small geometric prints can create moiré — visible interference patterns — on camera. Loose patterns and texture are fine. Jewelry should be subtle; statement pieces date a photo quickly. Logos on clothing date a photo even faster. Bring two options if you’re not sure. A blazer over a fitted shirt is the safest universal option for both LinkedIn and a website bio. Iron everything the night before. The day before Sleep. Genuinely. The single biggest difference between a great and a mediocre headshot is whether the subject is well-rested. The eyes carry the entire portrait, and exhausted eyes show. Drink water through the day — dehydration shows in the skin. Get a haircut about a week out, not the day before. Fresh haircuts photograph as fresh haircuts for the first few days, then settle. Don’t try a new product, treatment, or skincare routine in the 48 hours before — you don’t want a reaction on camera. On the day Bring a lint roller, a small mirror, and a backup shirt in case you spill coffee on the way over. Don’t wear sunglasses or a hat to the session — temporary creases and indentations take longer to settle than you’d expect. If you wear makeup, go slightly heavier than you would for a normal day — camera flattens skin tones. Powder over any shine on the forehead and chin. If you wear glasses, anti-reflective coating helps; bringing the prescription frames without lenses is another option some clients choose for the headshot, then putting them back after. How to get a natural expression The expression is the whole portrait. The single trick that works: don’t “hold” a smile. Hold a thought instead. A genuine memory or a funny moment from earlier in the day produces the natural, settled expression that earns trust at a glance. A held smile produces stiffness. A good photographer will talk to you the entire time and steer you toward the version of you that you’d want to see at a thumbnail size. Trust the direction — it’s the part of the work that takes the longest to develop. After the session Most professional sessions deliver 5–7 unedited selects within a few business days. You pick one (or sometimes two), and the photographer professionally retouches and delivers final images in 3–5 business days. Don’t over-pick — go with the one where you look most like yourself, not the one where you look most polished. The first one almost always wins. Related: San Francisco Corporate Headshots · Executive Headshots · LinkedIn Headshots · Book a session
LinkedIn profile views are a quiet but expensive game. Your headshot decides whether a recruiter spends ten seconds on your profile or scrolls past. Here’s what separates a great LinkedIn headshot from a forgettable one in 2026 — informed by ten-plus years of running corporate headshot days at SF Bay Area companies. LinkedIn specs you need to know LinkedIn displays your profile photo at roughly 200×200 pixels on a profile and about 100×100 in the feed. That’s small. Anything below the chin gets cropped off. Anything above the eyebrows compresses. The face fills nearly the whole frame. A headshot composed for a website bio (tighter shoulders, more headroom) doesn’t translate — it crops badly at LinkedIn’s display size. The rule of thumb: shoot the LinkedIn version tighter than you think you need. Eyes should sit in the upper third of the frame so they remain visible at thumbnail size. The face is the whole portrait. The five things that separate great LinkedIn headshots from forgettable ones 1. Eye contact, not just the camera. Look through the lens at someone you’d want to greet warmly. The difference is visible in the final frame. 2. Even, flattering light. Direct overhead light (typical office fluorescents) creates harsh shadows under the eyes and chin. Window light from the side, or a professional softbox setup, fills the face evenly. 3. A background that supports rather than competes. A clean, slightly-out-of-focus background lets the face stay the focus at thumbnail size. Busy backgrounds disappear into noise at 100 pixels. 4. An expression that looks like you. Not a held smile — a settled, warm version of your natural expression. The photographer’s job is to make that show up on camera. 5. Modern color and grading. Heavy filters, warm orange skin, or overly-blue corporate looks all date a portrait. Natural skin tones age the best. Mistakes that hurt your LinkedIn profile Cropped wedding photos. Vacation photos with sunglasses on top of your head. Photos from more than five years ago. Selfies. Group photos with the others blurred out. Pure-black or pure-white backgrounds that fight the LinkedIn UI. Any one of these is a small handicap; together they’re a serious one. The cost of fixing it is one session, every three to five years. The cost of not fixing it is silent — you’ll never know which doors didn’t open. AI vs real LinkedIn headshots in 2026 AI tools can produce a passable LinkedIn portrait for $30. The honest answer: it’s usually fine for early-career roles and casual use. It’s not fine for executives, founders, attorneys, sales leaders, or anyone whose first impression carries real money. We covered this in more depth here. Related: San Francisco LinkedIn Headshots · San Francisco Corporate Headshots · How to Prepare for a Headshot Session · Get in touch
Over the past few days I’ve been photographing aerial coverage of Google I/O from a fixed-wing aircraft, flying out of Marin and down over Silicon Valley multiple times a day. The assignment was coordinated aerial photography around Google’s campus — but spending extended time in the air over the Bay Area opened the door to capturing editorial frames of some of the region’s most recognizable locations: the Golden Gate Bridge, Apple Park, Alcatraz, Levi’s Stadium, and downtown San Francisco — all from above. Editorial coverage distributed through AFP Several of the additional aerial frames were distributed through Agence France-Presse (AFP), which meant a single block of air time produced both commercial aerial photography for the Google assignment and editorial photography for the AFP wire — work that ran in news outlets across the country. It’s the kind of dual-purpose flight that makes long aerial assignments worth the cost of the airframe. Fixed-wing vs. drone aerial photography A lot of my aerial work is done with FAA Part 107 drone photography — but for coverage of Silicon Valley campuses, large stretches of San Francisco, and Bay Area landmarks from real altitude, a fixed-wing aircraft is the right tool. Drones are constrained by altitude limits, airspace authorizations, and battery life. A fixed-wing lets me cover the entire region — Marin to Mountain View, Cupertino to the Embarcadero — in a single afternoon, with the perspective and reach you can’t get any other way. The Golden Gate from the air One of the rewards of an aerial assignment over the Bay Area is the chance to work the Golden Gate Bridge from multiple angles in a single afternoon — sometimes through marine fog, sometimes from directly above, sometimes from the Marin side looking back at the city. Light and weather change by the minute up there, and a few minutes’ difference can completely change the frame. More frames from the flight A few additional Bay Area landmarks and skyline frames captured during the same week of flights: Bay Area aerial photography for editorial and commercial clients I work with corporate, editorial, and news clients on aerial photography across the Bay Area and Silicon Valley — from tech campuses and large outdoor events to news features and architectural projects. Whether the job calls for drone, fixed-wing, or helicopter coverage, the goal is the same: an aerial frame that tells the story rather than just showing it from above. Related: Aerial & Drone Photography · Corporate Event Photography · Silicon Valley / San Jose Corporate Photographer · News & Features · Get in touch
In early 2026, I traveled to Seattle to photograph Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman at Amazon’s campus in South Lake Union — one of the Pacific Northwest’s most recognizable corporate environments. The session was an executive portrait project for AWS, and it delivered the kind of high-pressure, high-stakes photography that defines corporate work at this level. Shooting at Amazon HQ Amazon’s South Lake Union campus is enormous, architecturally distinctive, and busy at every hour of the workday. For executive portrait sessions here, the challenge is finding a setting that reads as authoritative without being generic — something that says “this is Amazon” without becoming a background that could be anywhere. We settled on a location within the headquarters that balanced the company’s architectural scale with a sense of approachability. The goal was a frame that works equally for a CEO press profile, a conference keynote, and internal communications — a range of end uses that demands both editorial sharpness and professional versatility. Working on CEO Time Executive portrait sessions at the C-suite level operate on compressed schedules. You get the window you get — and the expectation is that you deliver regardless of what shifted in the hour before. The location you scouted may not be available. The light changed. Something ran long. You adapt, and you make it work. Matt Garman came to the session focused and direct, which is exactly what you want from a subject under time pressure. My approach was to work quickly, give minimal direction, and stay responsive to what the subject was naturally giving me rather than trying to impose a predetermined shot. The best executive portraits happen in the margins of the moment — not the setup, but the instant right after. Seattle Corporate Photography This shoot is part of my regular travel to Seattle, where I work with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and a growing roster of Pacific Northwest companies across technology, healthcare, aerospace, and enterprise. Seattle’s corporate photography market has grown substantially alongside its tech sector — demand for high-quality executive portraits, all-hands event coverage, and office lifestyle photography has kept pace with the city’s rapid corporate expansion. I’m available for single-day and multi-day projects throughout the greater Seattle area, including downtown Seattle, South Lake Union, Bellevue, Redmond, and Kirkland. I regularly combine Seattle visits with other Pacific Northwest assignments to keep travel costs manageable for clients. If you’re planning executive portraits, a product launch, an all-hands event, or office lifestyle photography in Seattle, get in touch or visit the Seattle corporate photographer page for more on what I offer in the market. About This Work The AWS CEO portraits join a portfolio of executive photography that includes Google CEO Sundar Pichai, teams across Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and dozens of other Fortune 500 companies. Corporate portrait work at this level is less about technical complexity and more about preparation, efficiency, and reading the room — skills that develop over hundreds of high-stakes sessions across a decade-plus career. Related services: Corporate & Executive Headshots · Corporate Event Photography · Seattle Corporate Photographer Frequently Asked Questions Do you travel to Seattle regularly for corporate photography?Yes — I combine Seattle visits with other Pacific Northwest assignments and am available for single-day and multi-day projects throughout the greater metro, including Bellevue, Redmond, and Kirkland. What types of corporate photography do you offer in Seattle?Executive headshots, team portraits, corporate event coverage, office lifestyle photography, and FAA Part 107 certified aerial/drone photography for campuses and outdoor events. How far in advance should I book a Seattle corporate photography session?Two to four weeks is typical for most projects. Sessions around major conference seasons — AWS re:Invent planning cycles, tech announcement windows — book earlier.
