Candid Business Photography for Company Branding: NYC & Boston
Boston based photographer David Shopper creates graceful and spirited candid corporate photography that brands businesses. As one of the most trusted corporate photographers in Boston, David has been creating professional business headshots in and near Boston and NYC for over 3 decades. In conjunction with David’s executive corporate portraiture, his business workplace candid photography rounds out the public face of a company.
For a company’s marketing to be successful, it has to present a cohesive visual brand. That means the photography has to work in tandem with the graphics, colors pallet, and tone of the website or collateral material. The photographs must also help define the culture of the company – what their space looks like (is it modern or classic, etc.), what their people look like (are they funky innovators or established veterans), and how work gets done (do individuals effort problems alone or do groups interact and collaborate to solve issues).
So capturing corporate culture in a photographic way means presenting a company as individuals (who each have a story to tell) interacting in groups.
Based in Boston and shooting in New York City, across the USA, and in European countries such as England, France, and Germany, David believes that the best commercial photographs captures the mood and business culture of a company. In his 30 years of creating Boston business portraits, he has tried to capture the wheels turning inside people’s heads and the give-and-take of collaboration. The physical location of the photographs is also important: he strives to give a healthy, optimistic, expansive, and rich feel to the offices, conference rooms, and clean rooms he shoots in.
David elicits emotion with candid editorial photographs of executives and staff. The way he gets authentic, industrious, and authoritative expressions and poses is to allow his subjects to feel comfortable and inhabit an environment where they feel empowered. Most of David's work is used for advertising usage. For example, many companies use his imagery for website promotion, about-us pages, team bio pages, website banners, LinkedIn profile headshot pictures, Outlook identifiers, portraits for speaking engagements, etc. Many of David’s clients are global companies and many are small-and medium-sized companies who are rebranding their websites or want to change the public face of their business.
As a Boston- and New York-based commercial photographer, David travels to his clients’ sites to photograph real people in real environments. Many clients are located in Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. David has travelled all over the United States and in Europe to photograph working environments. He does this with an eye towards helping the company define their brand – the image that they project to their audience over the world wide web, social media, and print advertising or corporate collateral. So the objective is not to document the everyday candid workings of a business, but to present the corporate culture in a way that resonates with the viewer and creates a bond between the consumer and the company brand. Some clients describe this type of work as editorial photography, which means that instead of creating and directing photographs, he orchestrates certain events in photogenic environments and just captures what takes place naturally. This approach gives David’s photographs the power and authenticity you see in his portfolio. You can see some behind-the-scenes stories and pictures on David’s commercial photography blog.
David brings his 30+ years of experience shooting corporate portraits, company events, CEO headshots, and working sessions, to every shoot, giving each client a bespoke approach that matches their brand and their staff. Are they looking to be seen as established and authoritative or perhaps cutting edge and agile? This will help determine the photographic tools David uses – shooting natural light photography or using strobe lights to illuminate offices and interiors, shooting in a boardroom rather than an open space. There is no “right” or “wrong” photographs, there is only what works and what doesn’t work, what illustrates a point and creates the intended reaction. Whatever the solutions, David is specific in his statements of work and he comes in on-time and on-budget. There are no surprises when you work with his team.
The image above was taken for a Connecticut-based capital advisor firm. It was used to rebrand the company website and shows one of the company’s female executives in a brainstorming session. | David Shopper Photography, 2 Central Street, Suite 17, Ipswich, MA, 01938, (978) 356-1011