“They look great! Thanks so much Sharon, awesome job!”
– Carly Hobday, Senior Change Management Consultant, Toyota“Seriously, the best experience I’ve had working with a service provider!”
– Matthew Philips, Change Manager, Toyota
How do you get responses like this from a client?
Take a huge technical and logistical challenge, problem-solve the sh*t out of it, and deliver fantastic results on time and to budget. Boom!
1320 staff headshots from 12 Toyota locations nationwide – what a job!
Sharon was approached by Stuart of Stuart Pettigrew Design, who was helping Toyota Australia roll out their new company-wide HR system. As part of the rollout they wanted a photographer to create new staff headshots of all employees for their new HR profiles.
Toyota wanted each headshot to have a consistent look – same lighting, same background, same cropping – and wanted one photographer who could go to each location and photograph every employee the same way. It’s all pretty straightforward, until you realise the vast scale of the job:
- 1300+ staff headshots
- 12 different shoot locations spanning large offices, small satellite offices, and parts warehouses.
- Sited across 4 cities nationwide
Hmmm…. this is going to take some planning.
But wait, there’s more! The ID of everyone photographed had to be tracked, with their Employee ID numbers attached to the correct photo files so the HR system could automatically upload the photos to the right profiles.
AND, the HR system automatically crops each image to a small circle, so we had to ensure the framing captured in camera was lined up perfectly to ensure the automatic crop would hit in just the right place.
Luckily at Image Workshop we love getting stuck in to a meaty technical challenge, like the pop-up live studio we created for Beats By Dre, or that time we translated an artwork in a tiny garage onto Melbourne’s biggest billboard. We sharpened our pencils and put our planning-hats on.
Setting up to shoot in the Melbourne office
Ready to rock headshots of the warehouse staff in Brisbane
We spec’ed out a Tardis-like travelling studio setup that packed down into a couple of bags and was airplane-travel-friendly, but still contained multiple lights & lightstands, modifiers, camera gear, backup lights/lenses/camera, PLUS a stool and a folding white backdrop to provide a consistent background tone no matter what the location.
Lighting and camera settings were tested ahead of time and mapped out on a Master Setup Plan – allowing Sharon to set up from scratch within minutes and have the same lighting results no matter whether she was shooting corporate headshots in a brightly lit office or a dark corner of a warehouse. Set framing parameters ensured the automatic crop would work perfectly when the photos were uploaded to the HR system.
Achieving a consistent look across locations
Employees below were photographed at the Melbourne head office, Adelaide regional office and a Brisbane warehouse.
We managed all the file admin, tracking employee names against their images and appending employee ID numbers to the files so that Toyota could upload all the final images in bulk. A multi-stage processing workflow allowed us to get high quality results efficiently and track files through each stage. Final employee portraits were output at a specific target resolution to work withe HR system, but we also provided folders of images optimised for use on social media such as LinkedIn, as well as high res files for print or other uses.
4 cities, 12 shoot days, 1320 people photographed, 267 gigabytes of data… and 1 very happy client.
