Team Headshots Without an Office: How to Do It Well

You can get good team headshots without an office. Hire a studio for one day, send a photographer to a neutral space (a hired room, a co-working spot, someone’s home), or, for people who really can’t travel, give them a strict DIY brief. For London-based teams, the studio day is usually the simplest. Everyone turns up, everyone gets the same light and the same backdrop, and your team page looks like one team.

This guide walks through the options, what each really costs you in time and consistency, and how to run the day so nobody dreads it.

Why not having an office is actually fine

Lots of people assume a team headshot day needs a spare meeting room, a quiet corridor and an office manager with a spreadsheet. It doesn’t. The photographer brings the lights. All you need is a space, or no space at all if you use a studio.

The real problem for remote and hybrid teams is different: consistency. If six people take their own photos at home, you get six different backgrounds, six different crops and six different moods. Put those on one About page and it looks patchy, however nice each photo is.

So the question isn’t “where is our office?” It’s “how do we get everyone photographed in the same light, with the same look, with the least fuss?”

Your four options, compared

We’ll go through each one.

Option 1: a studio day

This is the one we’d point most London teams towards. Nobody needs to host anything. Staff come in on their slot, have their photos taken, and head off again. The lighting is set once, so the first person and the last person look like they belong together.

It also suits remote staff who live in or around London and only come into town now and then. Pick a day, let people choose their slot, and it becomes a small reason to meet up. Add lunch afterwards and you’ve got a team day out of it.

We run studio sessions in West London, and you can see how our team headshot packages work. Team pricing is £50-80 per person across our Starter, Standard and Full Day options, depending on how long the booking is and what’s included.

If you want to see how the studio set-up looks, have a look at our studio page.

Option 2: on-location in a space you hire

No office, but still want the photographer to come to you? Then pick a neutral space. A hired meeting room, a co-working day pass, a café that’s quiet in the morning, a friend’s loft, even a big living room. What matters is:

• enough room for the photographer to set up lights and a backdrop
• a plug socket or two
• somewhere people can wait without crowding the shoot
• a quiet moment, so nobody feels watched

We do on-location work across London. There’s no published price for our On-Location option because it depends on the location, group size and time, so get in touch about on-location sessions and tell us what you’ve got. Our guide to on-location London photography explains how it works, and what an on-location portrait session involves is worth a look if you’ve never done one.

If you do have a spare room at someone’s home or a rented space, our 10-minute office headshot setup page shows how quickly a portable set-up goes in. The same logic applies away from an office.

Option 3: the photographer goes to the people

Sometimes your team is spread across Hackney, Richmond, Barnet and Bromley and nobody wants to cross London. A photographer can visit people one at a time, or in small clusters. It takes more scheduling, but it works.

The one thing to insist on: the same lighting style, backdrop colour, crop and editing for every person. Agree those before anyone is photographed. Our guides on professional headshot backgrounds and business headshot formats cover what to decide, like square versus portrait crop, so the finished set matches.

Option 4: DIY and remote guided shots

For people who live abroad, or who can’t be reached by any photographer, a DIY brief is the fallback. It can look decent, but only if you’re strict about it.

The team at CORE, a web design agency, have written about taking your own headshots when budget or geography get in the way. Their advice boils down to a “do not” list:

• no flash
• no selfie angle
• no standing against windows or mirrors
• no editing apps that crop or add filters

Instead, stand in a naturally lit spot facing a plain, uncluttered wall, and put the phone on a tripod or a stable surface rather than holding it. They also suggest using portrait mode, framing from the waist up, and leaving roughly 30% wall space above the head.

If you go this route, send everyone the same one-page brief, with an example photo, and ask for the original file, not a cropped one. Our guides to natural light headshots (start one to two metres from the window) and what to wear are easy things to forward to colleagues.

What about AI headshots?

You’ll see a lot of tools offering AI-generated team headshots from selfies. The BBC looked at AI-created profile pictures back in 2023, and found that tools like Remini ask you to upload eight to 10 selfies and then produce polished results that aim to look like a photographer took them. Fine for a quick experiment. But if your team page is meant to show real people your clients will actually meet, a real photo is the honest choice, and it’s the one we’d always recommend.

How to run the day when there’s no office manager

With no office, the job of organising often lands on whoever’s free. Here’s a simple plan.

1. Pick one owner. Granary, a digital agency, make the point in their guide to organising a team headshot day that the photography is the easy bit. What decides whether the day runs to time is a spreadsheet and one person who owns it.
2. Book early. Single sessions need a few weeks, and teams need two to three months, as we explain on our booking lead times page. Don’t leave it until the week you’re launching a new site.
3. Send a one-page brief. What to wear, what to avoid, where to go, what time. Done.
4. Build in slack. Granary suggest that with fifteen people, a spare slot every hour absorbs late arrivals without pushing the whole schedule back.
5. Don’t put the most camera-shy person first. Granary’s advice is to let them watch a colleague go through it first and see that it’s quick and undramatic. We’ve seen this work every time.
6. Agree how photos get picked. Tell people when they’ll see their shots and how many choices they get. That avoids three weeks of email back and forth.

A simple timetable

For a team of twelve at a studio, a rough day looks like this:

• 9:30: photographer set-up and test shots
• 10:00 to 13:00: individual sessions, with a spare slot each hour
• 13:00: break, plus catch-up with whoever’s late
• 14:00 to 16:00: second batch, plus any group shot

Yours will depend on the number of people and what’s included, but that’s the shape.

Keeping the whole thing looking like one team

Team photos sit in more places than one: your site, LinkedIn, email signatures, proposals, speaker bios. Remote teams tend to feel the mismatch most, because people were photographed at different times by different people.

A few rules help:

• same backdrop colour and light direction for everyone
• same crop (head and shoulders, or waist up, but not both)
• same level of retouching, kept natural
• a plan for new joiners, so they’re photographed in the same way later

On that last point, it pays to keep the details of your first session (backdrop, distance, lighting style). If you’d like to read more on keeping a coherent professional look across web pages and profiles, there’s a useful piece on professional photography for websites. And our own guide to a headshot for your company website shows how to match the photos to your page layout. If you want to see why this matters commercially, read why companies invest in team headshots.

Our view: what we’d do if we were you

We’ve done over 500 sessions now, and the pattern with teams that don’t have an office is pretty clear. The ones who are happiest at the end did three things. They picked one spot and one day instead of trying to please everybody. They let the photographer direct people (most folks have no idea what to do with their hands, and that’s fine, that’s our job). And they kept the editing honest, so colleagues still look like themselves on a Monday morning video call.

If most of your team is in London, book the studio. It costs less hassle than anything else, and people get same-week turnaround from us. If a few people are far away, photograph the London group properly and give the others a strict DIY brief, then ask them to join a studio day if they’re ever in town. Don’t mix random phone photos with professional ones and hope nobody notices. People notice.

And if you’re nervous about being in front of the camera, you’re in good company. Almost everyone is. The first two minutes are the worst, and then it gets easy.

— Emmet

Book your team in

We photograph teams in our West London studio and on location across London, with directed posing, honest retouching and a quick turnaround. Team sessions are priced at £50-80 per person, and our team headshots page has the Starter, Standard and Full Day options side by side. If you only need one or two people, a single headshot is £99 on our headshots page. Tell us how many people you’ve got and where they are, and we’ll suggest what fits.

FAQ

Can we do team headshots if nobody works in the same place?

Yes. Hire a studio for a day, or have a photographer set up in a neutral hired room. Either way you control the light and backdrop, so everyone matches. People who are too far away can follow a strict DIY brief.

How long does each person take?

On a well-run day, it’s usually a short slot per person, with a spare slot every hour in case people are late. Allow a bit longer for anyone who is nervous, and don’t put them first.

What if some of the team are abroad?

Photograph the London group professionally, then send the others a clear one-page brief: natural light, plain wall, tripod, no filters. Ask for the original file so you can keep the crop consistent. Where you can, invite them to a session when they’re next in London.

Are AI headshots a good alternative?

They’re quick, but the results are generated from selfies rather than a real photo session, and some tools ask for eight to 10 uploads. If your team page is there to build trust with real clients, we’d stick with real photographs.

How far ahead should we book?

Single sessions need a few weeks, while teams should aim for two to three months, according to our lead time guide. Earlier is easier, especially if you’re launching a new site.

Sources

• Team headshots when budget or geography get in the way, CORE
• Team headshot day: how to organise fifteen people, Granary
• Could an AI-created profile picture help you get a job? BBC News

Recommended

• Headshot Posing: 8 Poses Tested in Studio for Natural Photos
• Headshot outfit examples for professionals: 2026 guide
• Office Managers: 10 Minute Headshot Setup with Tethered Review
• Top 4 best headshot styles corporate profiles 2026