Investment bank headshots that match across every office

Investment bank headshots go out of date at predictable moments. The promotion round is the obvious one: a new group of managing directors and directors needs portraits in time for the announcement and the rewritten bios. The MD intake follows, bringing senior laterals from rival banks whose existing pictures were taken to another house's rules. The analyst class arrives in one wave, and every new starter needs a picture on Teams and Outlook.

The quieter triggers matter as much. A new head of a coverage group needs a portrait for the press release and the pitch book. A merger puts two sets of pictures, by two different photographers, on to one website. A rebrand or a website relaunch exposes every mismatched crop at once. A new office in another city needs its first team photographed to the same look as London. The annual report needs the executive committee shot to one standard, not gathered from whatever each person had on file.

Banking portraits sit at the formal end of corporate work. Our Classic look is the natural starting point: grey, white or black behind the sitter, soft and even light, and a head-and-shoulders frame. It is the picture a client expects to find in a pitch book, and it ages slowly.

Managing directors are often treated differently from the wider team, and the Standard can record that difference. The senior group can be booked on an Executive Day, and the Standard can let their light move towards Editorial, with deeper shadow and a darker backdrop. The framing and crop stay the same as everyone else's, so an MD reads as senior without looking as though they joined from another firm.

Compliance teams will ask where the camera points. With Classic or Editorial, the answer is a backdrop, so no screen, deal name or whiteboard can appear in the frame. If you would like our Environmental style, with your own floor softly out of focus behind the sitter, agree the spaces with compliance first: a blurred screen is still a screen. Every banker approves their own frames on a tethered monitor before they leave. The finished files then go to each sitter's private gallery, not round the bank on a shared drive.

The bank circulates a booking link and each person picks a ten-minute window. A meeting room on or close to the floor works best, because the shorter the walk, the more reliably people keep their windows. On a trading floor the first sitters can come in before the open, so the desk is complete when the market starts. Each desk can agree among itself who takes the early windows, so cover never runs thin.

Coverage bankers can book around client calls. Analysts and associates fill the middle of the day, moving between the desk and the room without anyone noticing they have gone. A Standard Day takes up to 40 sitters, so a larger analyst class is spread across more than one day. The senior group goes on an Executive Day, which is capped at 12.

A bank changes shape all year. Promotions, the analyst class, laterals who move after bonus season and leavers whose pictures must come down: a single annual shoot cannot keep investment bank headshots current through all of that. The Quarterly Programme is four Standard Days a year at a locked rate, and we return each quarter, to London and to your other offices. One visit can follow the promotion round, another can catch the new analysts, and the remaining two keep laterals and moves up to date. The portal stays open all year, so a banker who needs a file again can collect it without asking marketing.

Every visit works to the same written Standard, wherever it takes place and whichever of our photographers is behind the camera. The retouching follows its finishing specification. Lens and perspective are corrected, exposure and white balance brought to the reference frame, the backdrop evened from one image to the next and the eyes set at one height. Before release, each image is compared with its neighbours. That is how a director photographed overseas ends up looking like one photographed in London last spring.

Tell us your offices, the headcount in each and the dates that matter, and we will propose a programme around them.