Political portraits — 01

The portrait the whole campaign is built on.

A campaign portrait is asked to do four jobs at once — hold at billboard scale, survive a ballot thumbnail, take a newsroom crop nobody briefed, and sit beside colleagues photographed in another town six weeks later. We shoot it once, against a written spec, and deliver every format it will be asked for.

One written spec Five crops per person Campaign-period licence

Brief this service All political portrait services

This is the core of the service: a portrait produced as campaign infrastructure rather than as a nice photograph. The look is agreed on a spec day and written down — light height and distance, modifier, power, lens, subject distance, background and exposure — and that document governs every subsequent session, whether the next one is tomorrow or in six weeks. Each person gets a directed session rather than a conveyor belt, but the setup around them never moves. What you receive is one retouched master per person, the complete crop set, colour and skin matched across everyone photographed, and a licence that covers the campaign period across print, digital, out-of-home and broadcast.

Throughput

35–45 / day

Crops per person

5 formats

Retouched master

1 per person

From

€90 / person

What the engagement contains

Specified once, then repeated exactly.

Spec day, signed off

We photograph two or three people first and lock the look with you before anybody else is scheduled. It becomes the written spec for the entire programme.

A directed session each

Eight to ten minutes per person on a slate day, longer for named candidates. Directed properly — posture, chin, hands, eyeline — not just triggered.

Three background registers

Light and open, institutional mid-grey, or weighted dark. Chosen per candidate at the brief, or shot as a set so you can decide later.

The full crop set

3:4 for the ballot and print listings, 1:1 for profiles, 4:5 for paid social, 16:9 for banners and lower-thirds, 3:1 for out-of-home.

Matched across the slate

Colour, contrast and skin tone matched so nobody looks better funded than the person next to them on the poster.

Licence and paperwork

Campaign-period licence across print, digital, OOH and broadcast, a signed release from every person, and an itemised invoice split by line.

The crop set is computed, not eyeballed.

The smart layer

Cutting five formats out of one frame by hand, several hundred times, is where consistency quietly dies — one operator crops a little tighter after lunch and the slate stops matching. So we do not do it by hand.

Face-anchored geometry
A detector locates the face in the master frame and returns its box and landmarks. Every crop is then computed from the eye line outward, at a face-to-frame ratio set per output shape.
Short frames get more room, not less
A 16:9 banner cut from a tall portrait runs out of space above the crown first. The geometry accounts for that automatically instead of decapitating the subject to hit a ratio.
A person still signs it off
Nothing is delivered on the machine’s say-so. Every generated crop is reviewed before it leaves the studio, and anything the geometry got wrong is re-cut by hand.

How it runs.

Step 01

Spec day

Two or three people photographed first. Background, register, crop set and retouch limits agreed and written down before the schedule opens.

Step 02

Schedule & throughput

Your list becomes a call sheet with a slot per person and a stated people-per-day rate you can plan against — studio in Sarajevo or a mobile station in the regions.

Step 03

Capture days

Same operator, same measured light, same lens and distance. The spec is re-set from the written sheet at the start of every day, not remembered.

Step 04

Match, crop, deliver

One selection per person, retouched inside the agreed limits, colour-matched across the set, cut to every crop and filed to your naming convention.

Per person

One selected, retouched master
Crop set: 3:4, 1:1, 4:5, 16:9, 3:1
Print resolution to A3 at 300dpi
Web-optimised set, correctly named

Across the slate

Matched colour, contrast and skin tone
The written lighting spec, handed to you
One structured archive, your naming convention
Late additions matched to the same spec

Rights & paperwork

Campaign-period licence: print, digital, OOH, broadcast
Signed release from every person photographed
Itemised invoice for campaign-finance reporting
Agreed purge date, confirmed in writing

Disclosure

Every frame on this page is our own studio reference work, photographed to demonstrate the standard. No client campaign material appears here, or anywhere else on this site.

Before you brief.

How is this different from a corporate headshot day?

Licensing, crop discipline and matching. A corporate headshot lives on a website at one size. A campaign portrait is re-cropped by people who never read the brief, printed at six metres, and has to sit beside several hundred others shot weeks apart — so the setup is written down and the crop set is produced for you rather than left to whoever needs it next.

Can we photograph in more than one town?

Yes. A mobile station travels to regional offices on an agreed roadshow schedule, running against the same written spec. Priced from €450 per day on top of the per-person rate.

What if we only need a handful of people?

The 1–19 band is €280 per person with an extended session each, against a minimum engagement of €1,400. Below about five people, the principal portrait is usually the better product.

The rest of the service.

Eight ways into the same standard. Most engagements combine two or three.

Candidate headshot days

Your list becomes a schedule with a named slot per person, so nobody loses a working day waiting for a turn that never comes.

Principal & leader portrait

No other names on the call sheet that day. The set is yours, the schedule is yours, and nobody is waiting outside in a corridor.

AI delivery engine

The detector returns a face box and landmarks; each crop is computed from the eye line at a face-to-frame ratio set per output shape, so every format frames the head consistently.

See all eight

Campaign portraits from €90 per person at volume. The principal portrait from €3,500.

Per-person rates fall with headcount: €280 at 1–19 people, €220 at 20–59, €140 at 60–149, from €90 at 150 or more. Minimum engagement €1,400.

See the full rate card

Send the list, or send the one name.

Tell us the headcount and the deadline and you will have a schedule and a fixed price within one business day.

Brief this service Political portraits