Corporate team portrait photographed as a composite, the standard brought to every Orange County on-site program by Henry David Photography

Orange County, CA

Corporate Photography & Video in Orange County

Headshots, leadership portraits, facility work and conference coverage from Irvine to Anaheim, shot by one photographer to one standard.

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Orange County holds roughly 91.7 million square feet of office inventory, and the companies inside it are not clustered in a single downtown. A headquarters sits in Irvine, a sister office sits in Costa Mesa, a plant sits in Fountain Valley, and the annual user conference runs in Anaheim. We handle all of it on one trip: executive and team headshots on a controlled background, environmental portraits at desks and benches, office and facility interiors, product and manufacturing detail, and multi-day event coverage. Photo and video come out of the same visit with the same lighting and the same look. We are based in St. Louis and fly in, which means the same photographer covers Irvine on Tuesday and Anaheim on Thursday.

The county reads as suburban to anyone arriving from a dense downtown, and that changes how a shoot day is planned. Office density concentrates in named pockets rather than a core: the Irvine Business Complex, described as Orange County's largest employment center; the Irvine Spectrum, which the Irvine Company markets as the county's tech hub; Newport Center around Fashion Island; South Coast Metro in Costa Mesa; and the Platinum Triangle and Anaheim Resort up north. Irvine alone carries about 43 million square feet across 205 buildings of 25,000 square feet or more. Brokers slice the rest into quadrant submarkets, including a 22 million square foot Central County submarket and an 8.7 million square foot West County submarket. Los Angeles is about 35 miles north of John Wayne Airport, and the two markets do not behave alike.

Companies here rarely have one address. A single employer may keep a headquarters tower in Irvine, a finance group in Costa Mesa and a distribution or clinical site elsewhere, and when three local photographers cover those three buildings the headshots stop matching on the leadership page. Orange County adds a structural reason to send one person. The Irvine Company is the largest owner of office space in both Orange County and the state of California, organizing its Orange County locations into five named areas: Airport Area, Irvine Market Place, Irvine Spectrum, Newport Center and UCI Research Park. Because one landlord controls so much Class A stock across Irvine, Newport Beach and the airport area, access at many separate addresses runs through the same kind of on-site property management relationship. One photographer learns that once and applies it everywhere.

Where the offices actually are

The districts a Orange County program usually touches, and the municipality each one is really in.

Irvine Business Complex

Irvine

Described as Orange County's largest employment center, and the reason Irvine carries about 43 million square feet of office across 205 buildings of 25,000 square feet or more. The IBC overlaps what brokers call the Airport Area, so a booking here often means Von Karman Avenue, Michelson Drive or Jamboree Road. Park Place, a 2 million square foot mixed-use complex on 105 acres at Jamboree Road and the I-405, sits in this part of the city.

Irvine Spectrum

Irvine

The Irvine Company markets the Spectrum as Orange County's tech hub and the Downtown of its office portfolio. 400 Spectrum Center Drive is the tallest building in the county at 21 stories and 323 feet, 426,000 square feet of Class A+ on 7.7 acres by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, and its twin at 200 Spectrum Center Drive is second tallest. Blizzard Entertainment occupies about 740,000 square feet in and around the Spectrum, and the adjacent retail and entertainment district runs more than 1.2 million square feet.

Newport Center and Fashion Island

Newport Beach

High-rise office wrapped around the Fashion Island retail center, with ocean and Big Canyon Country Club golf course views cited as the selling feature. PIMCO's headquarters at 650 Newport Center Drive was designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and built by the Irvine Company. 620 Newport Center Drive is a 16-story Irvine Company tower between MacArthur Boulevard and Jamboree Road with an on-site conference center and outdoor workspaces, which matters when a shoot needs a room and a terrace on the same floor.

The Airport Area

Irvine

A broker submarket, not a municipal one, and the towers in it carry Irvine 92612 addresses even though John Wayne Airport is in Santa Ana. Von Karman Towers is four Class A buildings at 18201, 18301 and 18401 Von Karman Avenue and 2211 Michelson Drive on a 75-acre master-planned campus with a landscaped stream, reflecting pond and water sculptures. Airport Tower at 18881 Von Karman is a 17-story Class A high-rise at Von Karman and Martin Street, and Irvine Towers sits at 18100 Von Karman.

South Coast Metro

Costa Mesa

A combined business, cultural arts and retail district, and the confirmed buildings sit in Costa Mesa 92626. Plaza Tower at 600 Anton Boulevard is a 21-story Class A tower completed in 1991 in stainless steel and dual-vision glass, designed by César Pelli, with 1,369 parking spaces and immediate access to I-405, SR-55 and the 73 Toll Road. Center Tower at 650 Town Center Drive is adjacent to the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Park Tower at 695 Town Center Drive runs 15 stories, and Experian North America anchors 475 Anton Boulevard.

The Anaheim Resort

Anaheim

An 1,100-acre district holding the Disneyland Resort theme parks and hotels, the Anaheim Convention Center, and the hotels, restaurants, shops, offices and visitor businesses around them. More than 25 million visitors a year are associated with Anaheim, and the hotel meeting space in this district is where most county conference work lands. Convention hotels here include the JW Marriott Anaheim Resort, Hilton Anaheim and the Anaheim Marriott.

The Platinum Triangle

Anaheim

A separate district from the Anaheim Resort and a different animal entirely: 820 acres surrounding and including Angel Stadium, Honda Center and The Grove of Anaheim, rezoned by the City of Anaheim in 2004 from industrial to high-density residential, office and mixed use. Long-term plans allow more than 16 million square feet of office and over 5.7 million square feet of commercial and retail, though that is entitlement capacity rather than built inventory. ocV!BE, a roughly $4 billion entertainment campus rising around Honda Center, was approved by the Anaheim Planning Commission in August 2022.

What Orange County actually does for a living

Different industries need different things photographed. These are the ones that shape the work here.

Medical devices and life sciences

Orange County holds 234 of California's 1,552 major medical device and equipment companies as of 2021, and of the 19 global-scale medical device companies headquartered in California the largest are in Irvine. Edwards Lifesciences is headquartered in Irvine with more than 5,000 employees there and over 19,000 worldwide. Masimo is headquartered in Irvine, from 15 employees in 1989 to close to 10,000 worldwide. Allergan is in Irvine, and Johnson & Johnson has run an Irvine medtech campus since 2016 with more than 2,000 employees. Irvine counts more than 60 mid to large size life science companies, among them AbbVie, Advanced Sterilization Products, Axonics, Inari Medical, Medtronic Neurovascular and B. Braun Medical. The county's life science sector produced $46.0 billion in economic output in 2021 and employs 28,953 county residents in medtech manufacturing.

Clinical and cleanroom environments photographed without breaking gowning protocol, plus scientist and engineer portraits that carry regulatory and investor materials.

Technology and semiconductors

Skyworks Solutions is headquartered in Irvine at 5260 California Avenue. Blizzard Entertainment is in Irvine, holding about 740,000 square feet in and around the Irvine Spectrum. Anduril Industries is headquartered in Costa Mesa after moving from Irvine, a short hop on the map that changes the city on every caption.

Lab and engineering floor coverage, recruiting imagery that shows the actual workspace, and a headshot set consistent enough to survive fast hiring.

Automotive

Three American arms of global automakers sit within a few miles of each other in three different cities. Hyundai Motor America is headquartered in Fountain Valley at 10550 Talbert Avenue, Kia America in Irvine at 111 Peters Canyon Road, and Mazda North American Operations in Irvine at 200 Spectrum Center Drive, in Irvine since 1987 with a grand opening at that tower in August 2017. Rivian also has an Irvine presence.

Vehicle and design studio work, dealer and training facility coverage, and leadership portraits that hold up against a manufacturer's brand guide.

Financial services, credit data and title

PIMCO is headquartered in Newport Beach at 650 Newport Center Drive and began as a unit of Pacific Life Insurance. Experian North America is at 475 Anton Boulevard in Costa Mesa, while parent Experian plc is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. First American Financial Corporation is headquartered in Santa Ana at 1 First American Way in title insurance and settlement services, and CoreLogic in Irvine was spun off from First American on June 1, 2010.

Conservative executive portraits, boardroom and trading floor environments, and annual report photography that matches across every office in the group.

Restaurants and consumer brands

Chipotle Mexican Grill is headquartered in Newport Beach, having announced the move from Denver in May 2018 and signed a 274,000 square foot lease. Taco Bell is headquartered in Irvine at 1 Glen Bell Way and has signed to keep its headquarters there until 2030.

Test kitchen and food photography, franchise and field team portraits, and support center culture imagery for careers pages.

Apparel and action sports

The surf industry's companies launched or landed in the coastal communities of San Clemente, Dana Point, Laguna, Newport, Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa. Quiksilver is in Huntington Beach, with roughly 1,262 workers at its 700,000 square foot campus out of about 1,560 worldwide, though those figures are dated. Fox Head Inc. consolidated finance, IT and sales operations at its Irvine headquarters.

Product and lookbook work, design studio and warehouse coverage, and portraits that read casual without looking accidental.

Conferences, trade shows and corporate events

Most large Orange County event work lands in Anaheim, and the venue names do not always tell you the city. The Anaheim Convention Center offers 1.8 million square feet of function space on 53 acres, including over 1 million square feet of exhibit space, 200,000 square feet of outdoor event space, versatile ballrooms and an arena seating 7,500. It opened in 1967 and completed a $190 million expansion in 2017. The venue's own materials describe it as the largest convention center and largest exhibit facility on the West Coast. Smaller general sessions, awards dinners and breakout programs spread across the resort hotels and south into Costa Mesa.

Anaheim Convention Center, Anaheim

1.8 million square feet of function space on 53 acres, over 1 million square feet of exhibit space, 200,000 square feet outdoors, and a 7,500-seat arena. Opened 1967, expanded in 2017 at a cost of $190 million.

Anaheim Marriott, Anaheim

More than 100,000 square feet of meeting and event space, four ballrooms, 44 breakout rooms, 30,000 square feet of pre-function space, and 1,030 rooms and suites.

Hyatt Regency Orange County, Garden Grove

Despite the name this hotel is in Garden Grove, not Anaheim, one mile from the Anaheim Convention Center. It offers 65,000 square feet of meeting space across 40 or more configurable rooms.

OC Fair & Event Center, Costa Mesa

150 acres with 134,060 square feet of total exhibit space, capacity for 664 booths, a largest room capacity of 5,000, and the Pacific Amphitheatre on site.

Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Costa Mesa

In South Coast Metro and adjacent to Center Tower, which makes an evening program and a next-morning office session a short walk apart.

Honda Center and Angel Stadium, Anaheim

Both sit inside the Platinum Triangle, the 820-acre district that is separate from the Anaheim Resort. ocV!BE, the roughly $4 billion entertainment campus rising around Honda Center, was approved by the Anaheim Planning Commission in August 2022.

Anaheim Resort convention hotels

JW Marriott Anaheim Resort, Hilton Anaheim, Courtyard by Marriott Anaheim Resort/Convention Center, SpringHill Suites at Anaheim Resort/Convention Center, Hyatt Place and Hyatt House at Anaheim Resort Convention Center, and Residence Inn at Anaheim Resort/Convention Center.

A conference day is a logistics problem before it is a photography problem. Keynote lighting, a trade show floor and a hotel breakout room are three different exposure situations in the same building, and the schedule rarely leaves time to rethink between them. We scout the rooms the night before or early that morning, confirm where the house lighting changes, work quietly during general sessions, and keep a lit headshot corner running on the side when a client wants portraits captured while attendees are already on site. Same-day selects can go out for social and press while the show is still running, with the full edit to follow.

Buildings and campuses in this market

•400 Spectrum Center Drive, Irvine, 21 stories and the tallest building in Orange County
•200 Spectrum Center Drive, Irvine, the twin tower and Mazda North American Operations' US headquarters
•650 Newport Center Drive, Newport Beach, PIMCO's headquarters
•620 Newport Center Drive, Newport Beach, a 16-story Irvine Company tower
•Plaza Tower, 600 Anton Boulevard, Costa Mesa, 21 stories by César Pelli
•Center Tower, 650 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, next to the Segerstrom Center for the Arts
•Park Tower, 695 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, 15 stories
•Von Karman Towers, 18201, 18301 and 18401 Von Karman Avenue and 2211 Michelson Drive, Irvine
•Airport Tower, 18881 Von Karman Avenue, Irvine, 17 stories
•Park Place, Jamboree Road at the I-405, Irvine, 2 million square feet on 105 acres
•Irvine Towers, 18100 Von Karman Avenue, Irvine
•The Summit Office Campus, 15 and 25 Enterprise, Aliso Viejo, part of a 1.7 million square foot master-planned campus

Sample work from client sessions. Every Orange County program is photographed to this same standard, by the same photographer.

Getting the place right

Get the geography wrong here and people notice. The border with Los Angeles County is called the Orange Curtain, a play on Iron Curtain that locals use sometimes derogatorily and sometimes lightheartedly to mark Orange County's more suburban character against a more urban Los Angeles. Calling the place "The OC" marks you as an outsider; residents say Orange County or plain OC. The naming traps are real and they show up in captions: the Anaheim Resort and the Platinum Triangle are different districts of different sizes with different anchors, so an 1,100-acre resort district is not the 820 acres around Angel Stadium. South Coast Metro is the district and South Coast Plaza is the mall inside it, a Costa Mesa center with more than 300 stores and among the highest-volume regional shopping centers in America. The Airport Area is a broker submarket whose office towers carry Irvine 92612 addresses, while John Wayne Airport itself is at 18601 Airport Way in Santa Ana. And the Hyatt Regency Orange County is in Garden Grove. Santa Ana is the county seat, with the Santa Ana Civic Center anchoring the west side of downtown and holding city, county and federal buildings.

What we make for Orange County teams

A headshot program is usually the first project. It is rarely the only one, and the same photographer handles the rest.

Corporate headshot programs

Whole teams photographed in one or two days, to one standard that holds as people join and leave.

See headshot programs

Executive portraits

Leadership portraits with the weight the business expects, for annual reports, press and the board page.

See executive portraits

Brand films and campaign video

Directed, filmed and edited by one person, from the first scope conversation through final delivery.

See brand film work

Recruiting and employer brand

Culture photography and video made in the building people would actually work in, for careers pages and hiring campaigns.

See recruiting work

Commercial and facility photography

A marketing team's image library for the year, so the next campaign does not start with a stock search.

See commercial work

Conference and event coverage

Sessions, keynotes, booths and headshot stations, photographed and filmed in the same visit.

See event coverage

Most of this work is booked together. A team that needs headshots usually also needs the recruiting film, the facility library and the conference coverage, and running it through one person is what keeps the whole set looking like it came from one company.

See how the full engagement works

We travel from St. Louis and fly into John Wayne Airport, which sits between Costa Mesa, Irvine and Newport Beach and serves more than 40 nonstop destinations in the United States, Canada and Mexico. SNA is 15 to 20 minutes from most Orange County cities, and Plaza Tower and the rest of South Coast Metro sit about 10 minutes out with immediate access to I-405, SR-55 and the 73 Toll Road. LAX is about 40 miles from central Orange County and the drive can run over an hour, so we route through SNA whenever the schedule allows. Travel is quoted as a flat line in the estimate, not billed as a surprise, and a multi-day trip spreads it across every office we cover.

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Orange County questions

What teams in this market usually ask first.

You are based in St. Louis. How does that work for an Orange County shoot?▼

We fly in with our own lighting and backdrop gear and work the same way we do at home. John Wayne Airport is 15 to 20 minutes from most Orange County cities, so a crew that lands in the morning can be lighting a conference room in Irvine by early afternoon. Travel appears as a flat line in the estimate. For companies with offices in more than one market, the advantage is that the same photographer shoots all of them, so a Newport Beach portrait and a Midwest portrait sit next to each other without looking like two different companies.

Can you cover several Orange County offices on one trip?▼

That is the usual arrangement, and the county's layout supports it. Irvine, Costa Mesa, Newport Beach, Santa Ana, Anaheim and Fountain Valley are separate cities but they are close together, and the freeway grid of I-405, SR-55 and the 73 Toll Road connects them. We build a schedule that puts the tightest sessions where parking and building access are most predictable, then move. Two or three buildings in a day is routine when each site knows its window in advance.

Should we plan around John Wayne Airport or LAX?▼

John Wayne, almost always. SNA is roughly 35 miles south of Los Angeles, sits between Costa Mesa, Irvine and Newport Beach, and serves more than 40 nonstop destinations in the United States, Canada and Mexico. It is 15 to 20 minutes from most Orange County cities. LAX is about 40 miles from central Orange County and the drive can exceed an hour, and the LAX to SNA leg alone is about 40 miles and roughly 44 minutes without traffic. If a schedule forces LAX, we build the extra time in rather than pretending it does not exist.

Do you also cover Los Angeles on the same trip?▼

Yes. Los Angeles is on the other side of what locals call the Orange Curtain, and a company with an Irvine office and a Los Angeles office can have both covered in one visit. We treat them as separate shoot days with their own call sheets, because the drive between them is unpredictable and nobody wants a leadership portrait session compressed by traffic. Adding a Los Angeles day usually costs less than commissioning a second photographer, and the results match.

Can we get photo and video from one visit?▼

Yes, and it is the more efficient way to do it. Executive portraits, an on-camera interview and B-roll of the floor all come out of the same lighting setup and the same block of an executive's time. We plan the order so nobody is asked to sit twice. For companies covering several Orange County sites, running both disciplines on each visit means the video cutaways and the still library come from the same day and carry the same look.

Our headshots were set by a previous photographer. Can you match them?▼

Usually, and it is a common request when a company adds offices faster than it re-shoots everyone. Send a few existing files and we will work back from them: background tone, crop, lighting direction and retouching level are all reproducible. If the original standard has problems that will get worse as the set grows, we will say so and propose a clean version you can migrate to over time. Either way we document the setup so the next session matches this one.

How far ahead should we book?▼

Three to four weeks is comfortable for a standard office day and gives us time to confirm building access, which in Orange County often runs through on-site property management at towers under a single large landlord. Conference coverage in Anaheim should be booked as early as you know your dates, because hotel and convention center windows fill well in advance. Shorter turnarounds are sometimes possible depending on flights. Send dates, cities and a rough headcount and you will hear back within one business day.

Working in Orange County?

Tell me the headcount, the offices and the dates. A proposal follows a short conversation, and questions are answered within one business day.

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