Palamon Capital Partners commission Piranha for regular portraits and office photo shoots to generate corporate portraits of their employees.

The images are taken in their London offices and other locations across the capital, sometimes at events they are attending.  After each photo shoot Piranha provides a website of the photographs taken on the day, as well as hi res jpegs of the images.  The selected shots are then used across different marketing materials and press coverage including here on their website’s ‘People’ page.

Overview page on website –

A couple of the individual biog. pages can be seen here –

Below are examples of one of our regular photo shoots for an international construction company.

On the day of each photo shoot the photographer sets up lighting and a white backdrop in a meeting room at the client’s London offices.  Then the employees are photographed in turn against the white backdrop to generate a selection of headshots of each person.

After the photo shoot Piranha supplies the client with a website of photographs showing the various images of each person.  From this website the company chooses a photograph of each person.  Piranha then processes the selected images and cuts them out in PhotoShop, using specialist software.

Once each portrait has been isolated from the white backdrop it can be placed on one of the background images that have already been captured and approved for use on a separate occasion.  This delivers the company with portraits ‘in situ’ but does not depend on moving the subjects into different areas of the building and changing the lighting set for each person.  It does though give a consistent and professional look and feel to the final staff headshots.

We have used this method of cutting out and replacing backgrounds for a number of clients.  It is particularly useful if photo shoots are going to take place over a number of months, and the required rooms for the background may not always be available.

Below you can see a few of the photographs we have been taking for Piranha’s new private equity client.  The photography takes place outside, utlising a wide variety of London backdrops.

Piranha’s client – Thomas Cook Money required portrait photographs for the ‘team page’ of their website. The images were taken at the company’s London offices with a variety of interesting backgrounds.

The brief for the portraits was for them to be relaxed and business like with a ‘blurred’ background, in a variety of locations, providing atmosphere and a sense of place without the background distracting from the subject of each photograph.

The photographs were shot at the client’s office in central London, using both of their floors and the public areas of the building such as the business lounge and reception area to vary the backgrounds in each shot, whilst maintaining the style.

The photography took place over two days.

Here are a few of the selected photographs taken during a day’s photography in Oxford. The business is a specialist investment management company. The images were taken for use on the company website and other literature to give a real sense of the working environment.

Brackendale Consulting required new headshots of their employees for their website.  The consultancy helps private equity clients with their marketing and branding as well as communication strategies. The team were extremely pleased with their final images, and even enjoyed the experience of being photographed on the day, which suprised them!

New Corporate Head Shots for Website

Piranha have been commissioned to photograph London staff members of AlixPartners for their new website project. This global company specialises in helping their corporate clients with turnaround and restructuring.

The brief was to achieve a new look and feel for all the head shots whether individual or photographed as a group and this is reflected in their new clean website design. Everyone was photographed whilst actively engaged in conversation with a colleague who provided the blurred foreground head and shoulders to give a greater sense of communication. The banner images featured a group of people in collective discussion, with specific placement of the subjects within the frame to allow for text and graphics.

This can be achieved with artificial or natural light but to keep the interruption and distraction to a minimum we went for daylight and used fast Leica lenses to allow for an attractive shallow depth of field, it was then a question of subject placement and careful processing of the RAW files each time to ensure consistent lighting, contrast and colour palette.

The Photography Brief

The feel of the final images is dynamic and contemporary, with a brief that required ‘active portraits’ that is photographs that convey a sense of AlixPartners staff in discussion with clients, caught in mid flow as it were. Not serious nor laughing too much – engaged in conversation.

This ongoing project has required a number of days of photography both during induction events and also for current staff members extra full days.  The next steps will be to photograph the various UK wide offices.

Below are a small selection of the images taken which are now being used to populate the new website.

Elsevier required photography of Robert Homewood a researcher at Goldsmiths University in London. The photograph was to be used to illustrate an online story on the client’s website about Intelligent Games and Games Intelligence. The article discussed how technology and artificial intelligence is changing and informing the way that games are developed.

A number of shots were taken around the university with a view to them fitting into the ‘letterbox’/’banner’ format of a website page.

A challenging balancing act for Equistone Partners Europe’s 
new website

Our brief from Equistone Partners Europe, a leading mid-market private equity firm, for its new website http://www.equistonepe.com/home demanded eye-catching but informal shots of its Partners and employees that captured ‘a sense of place’ in France, Switzerland and the UK, reflecting the importance Equistone sets on being local capital partners working in local markets.

The other important consideration was how well the photographs would display on the new site. When framing the pictures, we had to make sure we had allowed room for the site’s navigational banners.

And we needed just the right depth of field to keep subjects sharply in focus, while blurring the background to avoid distraction but leaving sufficient visual ‘clues’ about each country where Equistone operates. In the end, we were happy we had achieved this challenging balancing act.

For the technically minded, nearly all the photographs were taken on a new Leica M240 coupled with a 35mm Summicron ASPH lens.

The Leica M240, with its famous rangefinder design, is invaluable on location assignments, being light and durable with an almost silent shutter. This allows me as the photographer to blend into the background, which relaxes the subjects and is much less intimidating. It’s worth saying again that the Leica rangefinder is the camera behind most of the memorable and iconic images of the previous century.

Can we help you with your website?