For this commercial photography shoot with PIL Group, I headed to their Waikato factory to photograph both their team and the manufacturing process behind the business.

We created a mixture of professional staff portraits, environmental photographs throughout the factory and behind-the-scenes imagery of the team working. This gave them a broad collection of images covering both the people within the business and what happens on the factory floor.

Professional headshots for the team

Alongside the factory photography, we photographed individual team members against a clean white background.

Keeping the setup consistent across everyone created a cohesive set of professional portraits that could be used throughout their website, staff profiles and other business material.

For larger teams, this kind of simple setup also makes it much easier to keep everyone’s photographs looking like they belong together.

Photographing inside the factory

The other part of the shoot took us onto the factory floor, photographing the team within their actual working environment.

Rather than setting everything up for the camera, much of this part of the shoot focused on the manufacturing process as it happened. We photographed machinery running, materials moving through production, people working together and the smaller details throughout the process.

It gives the resulting gallery much more context than portraits alone could.

Environmental portraits in the workplace

We also photographed several team members individually within the factory.

These sit somewhere between a traditional headshot and an at-work photograph. The machinery, materials and factory environment remain visible around the person, immediately connecting them with the business and industry they work in.

Having both these and the clean white-background portraits gave PIL Group two quite different options depending on where an image needed to be used.

Building a commercial image library

By the end of the shoot, PIL Group had imagery covering their people, workplace and manufacturing process rather than a gallery made up entirely of staff portraits.

The finished collection included professional headshots, environmental portraits, factory photography, people at work, machinery and detailed process images, creating plenty of options for their website and wider business marketing.