Corporate Headshots & Interviews.
Executive portraits shot on a portable studio setup we bring to your office, plus multi-camera leadership interviews for annual reports, investor updates and About pages. Consistent lighting across every person on the team, retouched with a light hand — no waxy skin, no plastic eyes.
A corporate headshot is the single most-shared image of most professionals — LinkedIn, About pages, media bios, conference programmes, board decks. Getting it right means bringing a consistent studio-quality light into the client's own office rather than dragging 40 executives to a studio for one hour each. Getting the interview edit right — the piece that runs on the annual report landing page or in the investor update — means treating the executive like a person, not a talking head, and cutting for warmth as much as for clarity.
TimeSake Media brings a portable Profoto B10 Plus setup, a Sony A7 IV with an 85mm f/1.4 GM, and a full interview kit with a Rode NTG5 shotgun and a Sennheiser lav rig into the client's boardroom for the day. Headshots ship in 48 hours; interview edits in five business days. Every deliverable is retouched with a light hand — blemishes and stray hairs go, character stays. No waxy skin, no plastic eyes, no over-white teeth.
The portable-studio setup
A meeting room roughly four metres by four metres is enough for a full headshot production. We bring a Profoto B10 Plus with a soft octabox as the key, a smaller strip as the rim, a background stand with a portable grey or navy background, and a small monitor so the sitter can see the last frame while the producer runs the queue. Every person gets six to nine minutes in front of the camera — enough for wardrobe adjustment, three lighting positions and 40 to 60 frames to select from. A producer keeps the queue moving so the CFO does not wait an hour for their seven minutes, and we shoot 20 people comfortably in a morning or 30 in a full day.
Consistent light across the team
The failure mode of most corporate headshot sessions is that the CEO shoot looks different to the analyst shoot because the light drifted through the day. We lock the studio setup at the start, mark every position on the floor with tape, and calibrate the monitor to the exact background tone we agreed at the brief. The result is a full team page where every headshot reads as the same production — same key direction, same background, same crop, same skin tone rendering. Where a new hire joins six months later, we re-set the same lighting from the reference file so their portrait matches the rest of the team without a reshoot for everyone.
Wardrobe and expression coaching
Every sitter gets a short wardrobe brief a week ahead — solid colours, no bold patterns, no lanyard, no reading glasses if they can help it. On the shoot day the producer coaches expression: a real smile from a memory, a considered listening face, a strong direct look. Most executives find one of the three that suits their role and their industry — a lawyer often lands on the considered look, a founder on the direct look, a marketer on the smile. We shoot enough variation that the sitter has real options at delivery, and we deliver one polished master plus three alternates per person so the internal team can rotate crops without needing another shoot.
Leadership interviews
Leadership interview edits — for annual reports, investor updates, About pages and internal comms — run as a two-camera setup with an external lav rig and a controlled backdrop. We build the question set with the client's internal comms team a week ahead, and we work off answers rather than a script so the executive sounds like themselves rather than reading a paragraph they did not write. Interview edits ship as a 90-second web cut, a 30-second social vertical, and a full-length master for internal use. Every deliverable is captioned with English SDH captions, and where the client needs Afrikaans or isiZulu captions we work with a translation partner and layer those in the timeline.
Retouching, POPIA and delivery
Retouching is deliberately restrained. Skin gets frequency-separated to remove blemishes and stray hairs while the character of the face stays — no waxy over-smoothing, no whitened eyes. Retouching turnaround is 48 hours from the shoot for standard headshots. Every image ships in colour, black-and-white, LinkedIn-cropped and grid-cropped variants. POPIA compliance is baked in: every sitter signs a media release before their shot goes in the queue, and we archive the release with the image for six years. Where a team member declines to be shot, that seat stays empty in the team gallery and we do not photograph them for any workaround.
Case studies for this service publish quarterly. In the meantime, view the full portfolio.