Team headshot day: how to get fifteen people photographed and matching

By James Jones, founder of Granary Digital · 8 October 2026

Our team day covers up to fifteen people for £950 +VAT, at the barn or at your office, with one retouched image each and the same light and background for everyone. This guide is the organising half: how to get all fifteen to the right place at the right time, dressed for it, and onto the website with their names spelled correctly.

Give it to one person

Not a shared inbox and not a committee. One person books the date, sends the invitations, holds the running order and, on the day, goes to find the finance director who is still on a call. They need a phone that is switched on and enough standing to move someone's meeting.

Build a running order with slack in it

Once the slot length is agreed, do the arithmetic. Say it is ten minutes a person: fifteen people is two and a half hours in front of the camera, before anyone is late, needs the loo or wants another go at their hair. Put a spare slot in every hour or so. A late arrival slides into it instead of pushing everyone behind them.

A few rules make the order work.

• Put anyone with a hard stop, a client call at eleven for example, early in the day.
• Group people by team, so one department isn't empty all morning while another sits waiting.
• Don't put the most camera-shy person first. More on them below.
• Send each person their slot as a calendar invitation, not a line in an email.

One sheet everyone works from

Keep a single spreadsheet with a row per person:

• slot time
• name exactly as it should appear on the website, including accents and the spelling they actually use
• job title as it should appear
• anything worth knowing: glasses, a hard stop, a need for step-free access

Name the files from this sheet. That way a spelling mistake is caught once, in a spreadsheet, rather than fifteen times on a live website. Siobhan and Siobhán are different people as far as Siobhán is concerned.

Choose one background, once

We shoot on white, grey or dark. White reads bright and modern, grey is the safe professional choice, and dark suits senior roles and speaker bios. For a team, pick one and everyone matches.

Make the choice before the day, with whoever looks after the website, because the background has to sit with the page design as much as with the people. If the leadership team also want a dark picture for speaker bios, that is a second look each, and it needs time in the running order. Tell us the numbers and we will quote it. The same goes for teams of more than fifteen.

Send the dress note a week before

The general advice is in what to wear for a headshot, so send people the link rather than writing your own. What a team adds is agreement on formality. One person in a three-piece suit among fourteen in knitwear looks as if they wandered in from a different company. Decide the level together, then put it in one line in the invitation: jacket or no jacket, plain colours, no logos.

Somewhere to change, and a mirror

At the barn this is taken care of. The dressing room has a Hollywood-style mirror with bulbs round it, a long counter and a garment rail, and there is tea, coffee and water. There are fifteen parking spaces on site, and the barn is fifteen minutes by taxi from Chichester or Havant station, so a team coming by train can share cabs.

At your office, we bring the same light and background to you, so what you need to find is a room. It wants to be clearable for the whole session, long enough for the photographer to step well back from the background, and away from the kitchen and the main door. A meeting room that is booked for a meeting at eleven is not that room. Put a mirror somewhere nearby, even a borrowed one.

Consent, and what happens later

Say in the invitation where the pictures will be used: the website, LinkedIn, proposals, press. Say what happens to someone's picture when they leave. People are more relaxed in front of the camera when they know what the picture is for.

Decide in advance who chooses each person's one retouched image. It can be the person, their manager or whoever runs the website. Letting people choose their own takes a little longer and saves a great deal of quiet resentment.

The colleague who dreads it

Most teams have at least one person who would rather be anywhere else.

• Don't put them first or last. First means no warm-up; last means a whole morning of dread.
• Let them watch a colleague go before them, so they can see how quick and undramatic it is.
• Keep them talking. Nobody looks natural being told to relax.
• Show them an early frame on the camera. Seeing a decent picture of yourself two minutes in does more than any amount of reassurance.
• Remind them there is only one retouched image each. They only have to like one picture.

Keep the next new starter matching

The team page often falls apart with the next hire, who gets photographed against the office wall on their first Monday. Write the set-up down on the day: background, lighting, crop and the height the camera was at. When a new starter arrives, they can come to the barn for an individual session at £149 +VAT on the same background, with the notes from the day to match. How often a team should reshoot from scratch is in when to update your headshot, and the launch of the service is in new headshots at the barn.

If you are planning one, send us the headcount and where you would like to do it, and we will suggest a running order. The details are on the headshots page.

More from the Journal

• What to wear for a professional headshot
• New at the barn: business, team and actor headshots
• How much do professional headshots cost in the UK in 2026?
• All Journal articles

The picture at the top of this article is an illustration generated to show the set-up. It is not a photograph of a client or of a real job.