Case Study · Academic Medicine
WashU Neurosurgery Headshots
The Washington University Department of Neurosurgery needed one consistent set of headshots covering residents, advanced practice providers and faculty. We photographed the department in a single day, two looks each, and delivered 56 finished frames that sit together on one page.
56
Frames Delivered
2
Looks Per Person
1
Production Days
What a department directory usually looks like
Not because anyone did it wrong. Because headshots get taken one person at a time, over years, by whoever was free.
A directory that looked like six different departments
Faculty photographed years apart, residents shot on a phone against a wall, new hires missing entirely. On one page it read as a group of strangers rather than one department.
Nobody has a spare afternoon
Residents come off service, attendings come out of the OR, advanced practice providers are mid-clinic. Any plan that assumed a free hour was not going to survive contact with the schedule.
One picture never fits every use
The same person needs a white coat frame for the hospital directory and something less clinical for a conference bio or a LinkedIn profile.
How the day ran
The whole plan is built around the fact that clinical schedules do not bend for a photographer.
Two setups running in one room
A black seamless studio and a second position against the building's glass and stone. Everyone walked through both, so every person came away with a clinical frame and an environmental one from the same session.
A posted schedule people could drop into
People came through in waves between cases and clinic blocks rather than at one fixed hour, and the running order absorbed anyone who got held up.
Direction for people who dislike being photographed
Most surgeons and clinicians are not practiced at this and say so. The session is run on the assumption that the person in front of the camera would rather be somewhere else.
Matched light across both looks
The two setups were built to cut together. Put a black-background frame next to a hallway frame on the same page and they read as one library, not two shoots.
Two looks, one library
Both setups ran in the same room, built to cut together. Put one next to the other on a directory page and they read as one department rather than two shoots.
The white coat frame
Black seamless, clinical, built for the hospital directory.
The building frame
Glass and stone of the WashU Medicine building, for conference bios and faculty profiles.
The delivered library
All 56 frames from one production day. Residents, advanced practice providers and faculty, every person in both setups.
Photographing a department in St. Louis
Hospitals, academic departments and practice groups all have the same problem: the people who most need a current headshot have the least time to sit for one. The fix is a production day built around the schedule instead of against it.
Related work and services
Residents, advanced practice providers and faculty photographed in a single day, two looks each, for one departmental library.