Corporate team portrait showing the standard brought to every San Francisco on-site program by Henry David Photography

San Francisco, CA

Corporate photography and video in San Francisco

Headshots, team portraits, office and event coverage across the city, the Peninsula and the South Bay. One photographer, one standard, every office you have.

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San Francisco's office market is in the middle of a measurable recovery, and artificial intelligence is driving it. The city recorded 3.68 million square feet of leasing in Q2 2026, closing a first half of 7.75 million square feet that ranked as a record and ran 34.2% above the first half of 2025. Vacancy is falling, though brokers measure it differently: for Q2 2026, Kidder Mathews reported 27.2%, Hughes Marino reported 30.1% and CBRE reported roughly 29.7%. The three disagree on the level and agree on the direction, and Q2 2026 was the lowest San Francisco vacancy since Q2 2023. AI companies accounted for 47% of all new office leasing in the city in the first half of 2026. Companies are hiring, signing floors and needing pictures of both.

The recovery is not spread evenly across the city. As of Q2 2026 it concentrates in the South Financial District, SoMa and Mission Bay, with Jackson Square the tightest submarket in San Francisco: 18.5% vacancy in April 2026, against a city figure in the high twenties. Union Square and Mid-Market lag. The Howard Street corridor in SoMa is now marketed as AI Alley by DivcoWest, owner of 301 Howard, and Anthropic has assembled a cluster of buildings along it. Mission Bay's 303 acres run from UCSF to Chase Center. Then there is the distinction the address line hides. Much of what gets called San Francisco business is not in San Francisco. Genentech and Stripe are in South San Francisco. Sand Hill Road is in Menlo Park. Apple Park is in Cupertino.

A Bay Area company's headcount rarely sits in one building. The group a marketing director calls the San Francisco team is often a floor in the Financial District, an engineering or lab contingent down the Peninsula, and a second office in the South Bay. Photograph those on three different days with three different local photographers and the leadership page carries three different looks, which readers register even when they cannot name what is wrong. We fly in from St. Louis and shoot the whole set on one trip: one photographer, one lighting approach, one retouching standard, city offices and Peninsula offices inside the same week. The headshot made in a Montgomery Street conference room matches the one made in Santa Clara, and the next hire in either place matches too.

Where the offices actually are

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

Financial District

San Francisco

The formal downtown core: vertical towers, historic commercial blocks and direct transit. Class A direct rents here fell 5% quarter over quarter in Q2 2025 while still sitting 9% above the same period a year earlier, and by Q2 2026 the average Class A and B direct asking rent was $49.10 per square foot full service gross, up 4.2% from $47.11 a year before. 555 California Street, 101 California Street and the Transamerica Pyramid at 600 Montgomery are all inside it.

South Financial District

San Francisco

The submarket that holds Salesforce Tower. Through Q2 and Q3 2025 it carried some of the heaviest available supply in the city, alongside Yerba Buena, SoMa, Mid-Market and Union Square. By Q2 2026 the South Financial District and Mission Bay together accounted for the majority of the quarter's absorption and leasing gains, which makes it the clearest single example of how fast the picture changed.

SoMa, the Howard Street corridor

San Francisco

DivcoWest, owner of 301 Howard, markets this stretch as AI Alley. Anthropic occupies a full building in the corridor and has leased 300 Howard, 400 Howard, 500 Howard, 505 Howard and 342 Howard. Intuit leases at Foundry Square III alongside it, and KPMG shrank its San Francisco office by a third and moved into the corridor, reported September 2026. AI startups continue to drive deal volume here.

Mission Bay

San Francisco

303 acres planned as transit-oriented mixed-use redevelopment, anchored by adjacency to UCSF. Uber's global headquarters sits at 1725 Third Street, Chase Center and Mission Rock are on the waterfront, and OpenAI has been growing here since 2023. AI demand is reshaping the neighborhood as downsized biotech gives up space, which means new floors, new fitouts and a lot of first-week-in-the-building photography.

Jackson Square

San Francisco

Brick-and-timber low-rises rather than concrete towers, and the tightest submarket in the city: availability tightened to roughly 15% across Q2 and Q3 2025, and April 2026 vacancy was 18.5%, with AI startups and venture firms paying up to $140 per square foot. Bain Capital Ventures is at 450 Pacific Avenue, Thrive Capital bought a near-century-old building here, and Brick & Timber Collective owns three buildings inside the historic district. Exposed brick, timber beams and small floorplates, so the light behaves nothing like a tower floor.

Transbay

San Francisco

Organized around the Salesforce Transit Center at 425 Mission Street, capped by the 5.4-acre Salesforce Park. The terminal opened August 12, 2018, closed that October after flaws were found in two beams supporting the bus deck and rooftop garden, and reopened July 13, 2019. Salesforce Tower, 181 Fremont and 50 Fremont define the skyline here, and Strava moved its headquarters into four levels of 181 Fremont in 2025.

Union Square

San Francisco

A retail and hotel district rather than a tower district, and its recovery is described as incomplete, tied to tourism, public safety, transit, events and public space rather than office occupancy. It hosts the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference at the Westin St. Francis each January, which for one week makes it the densest concentration of life science executives in the country.

What San Francisco actually does for a living

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

Enterprise software and technology

Salesforce is headquartered at 415 Mission Street in San Francisco and is the largest tech employer headquartered in the city. Uber's global headquarters is at 1725 Third Street in Mission Bay, a four-building campus of more than 1 million square feet completed in 2021. The best-known Bay Area names sit outside the city limits: Google at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, Meta at 1 Hacker Way in Menlo Park, Apple Park in Cupertino, Nvidia on San Tomas Expressway in Santa Clara.

Leadership and engineering headshots that hold up next to each other across a company's city and Peninsula offices, plus environmental frames of real teams at work for careers pages and analyst decks.

Artificial intelligence

AI tenants occupied 9.36 million square feet in San Francisco as of Q2 2026, 13.8% of leased space, and have taken roughly 30% of leasing activity since 2023 and more than three quarters of net absorption. Anthropic crossed 1 million square feet in the city in spring 2026 along its Howard Street cluster in SoMa. OpenAI crossed 1 million square feet in the same period from Mission Bay, including the entire 315,000 square foot building at 550 Terry A. Francois Boulevard.

Fast-growing AI teams need a headshot standard that survives tripling headcount, plus recruiting and launch imagery made inside space that is often still being built out.

Healthcare and academic medicine

UCSF is the second-largest employer in San Francisco behind only the City and County, and the fourth largest in the Bay Area. It bought 409 Illinois Street, the former FibroGen headquarters, and adjacent 499 Illinois Street from Alexandria Real Estate Equities for a combined $767 million, and announced a new home for its School of Dentistry at Mission Bay in December 2025.

Physician and researcher portraits shot to one look across departments, plus lab and clinical environmental work that respects patient privacy and hospital access rules.

Biotech and life sciences

The municipality line matters here. Genentech is headquartered in South San Francisco, not San Francisco, with about 7,800 employees, the largest employer in that city, founded in 1976 and marking its 50th anniversary in 2026; a redesign of its South San Francisco campus costing up to $5 billion was reported in July 2025. South San Francisco is the birthplace of biotechnology, with over 250 biotech companies and 12 million square feet of facilities. Inside San Francisco proper, Gladstone Institutes was one of Mission Bay's first tenants in 2004 and signed a 105,000 square foot lease at 1450 Owens Street with plans to hire 300 scientists.

Scientist portraits and lab imagery for investor materials and hiring, usually with a hard rule about what may appear on a bench or a screen.

Law

Morrison & Foerster is at 425 Market Street with 750 to 1,000 attorneys and $1.4 billion in 2025 revenue, and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe has more than 1,000 attorneys, over $1.78 billion in 2025 revenue and more than 25 offices; both are headquartered in San Francisco. Morgan Lewis took 123,000 square feet at the Transamerica Pyramid on a roughly 20-year lease, with Baker Hostetler also in the building. Duane Morris holds 63,000 square feet at One Market Plaza and Kirkland & Ellis has been at 555 California. Cooley is headquartered in Palo Alto, not San Francisco, with more than 1,300 lawyers, and Latham & Watkins keeps a San Francisco office.

Attorney bio portraits on a strict single background and crop spec, re-shot for laterals and new associates without the look drifting between classes.

Finance and venture capital

Wells Fargo & Company lists its principal executive offices at 420 Montgomery Street in San Francisco in SEC filings. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Chime are among tenants at 101 California Street, and Citi holds more than 116,000 square feet at One Market Plaza. Venture capital splits geographically: Sand Hill Road is in Menlo Park, where nearly 50 firms sit along a roughly one-mile strip connecting Stanford with I-280 and the broader road hosts Redpoint, Greylock, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins and Andreessen Horowitz. San Francisco's own venture presence clusters in Jackson Square.

Partner and deal team portraits with a conservative, consistent treatment, plus office and meeting imagery for fund materials and portfolio announcements.

Conferences and large events in San Francisco

Two venues carry most of the corporate event calendar in the city, and both sit in or beside SoMa and Mission Bay, within walking distance of a good share of the office districts above. Event coverage travels well with the rest of a visit: a keynote day, a booth, an executive portrait session in a hotel suite and a team photo at the office can share one trip.

Moscone Center

On Howard Street in SoMa, the largest convention and exhibition complex in San Francisco, with more than 790,000 square feet of flexible exhibit space campus-wide. Moscone North and South together hold over 502,000 square feet of contiguous space across Halls A through F, and Moscone West holds over 290,000 square feet across three levels, with 96,660 square feet of dedicated exhibit space on Level 1.

Chase Center

In Mission Bay, opened 2019, home of the Golden State Warriors and host to nearly 200 events a year at a maximum capacity above 18,000. Private event inventory includes club levels, meeting rooms, the arena bowl and a top-floor space called Above the Rim with an outdoor terrace over the skyline and the waterfront park. The centerhung video board runs nearly 9,700 square feet, the largest in the NBA.

Shows that come here

Dreamforce

Dreamforce 2026 runs September 15 to 17, 2026 at Moscone Center, and the week spills well past the halls into hotels, restaurants and partner activations across SoMa.

J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference

The 2026 edition runs January 12 to 15, 2026 at the Westin St. Francis in Union Square, drawing hundreds of companies across pharma, biotech, digital health and investment firms. Most of the photography that week happens in side meetings and suites rather than on the main stage.

A conference day is a logistics problem before it is a photography problem. Badge and press credentials have to be arranged in advance, house lighting on a keynote stage is fixed and usually mixed color, and a show floor gives you no control at all, so the work is lens choice, shutter discipline and knowing where to stand. Same-day selects matter more at a conference than anywhere else, because the social and PR value of a keynote frame decays within hours. We plan the shot list against the run of show, agree on what has to be delivered before the day ends, and keep the rest for the full edit.

Buildings and campuses in this market

•Salesforce Tower, 415 Mission Street, 61 stories and 1,070 feet to tip
•Transamerica Pyramid, 600 Montgomery Street, remastered by SHVO with Foster + Partners in 2024
•555 California Street, a 52-story 1969 tower formerly the Bank of America Center
•101 California Street, 48 stories and 1.2 million square feet near the Embarcadero
•One Market Plaza, 1 Market Street, Spear Tower, Steuart Tower and the Southern Pacific Building
•Ferry Building, on the Embarcadero at the foot of Market Street
•Embarcadero Center, four towers, two hotels and a shopping center totaling 4.8 million square feet
•Salesforce Park, the 5.4-acre elevated park atop 425 Mission Street
•181 Fremont, an 803-foot mixed-use tower in Transbay
•Uber's Mission Bay headquarters campus at 1725 Third Street
•Mission Rock and the Visa Market Support Center on the Mission Bay waterfront
•Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio, home of Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic at One Letterman

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

Getting the place right

Getting the geography right is most of the credibility here. The city means San Francisco proper, the 47 square miles of the City and County, and locals use it that way in sentences where an outsider would say downtown. The Bay Area is the whole region, nine counties across San Francisco, the Peninsula, the South Bay and the East Bay. Silicon Valley is the South Bay and lower Peninsula, roughly Palo Alto through San Jose, and it is not a synonym for San Francisco. Plenty of companies people file under San Francisco are headquartered elsewhere: Genentech and Stripe in South San Francisco, Meta and Andreessen Horowitz in Menlo Park, Google in Mountain View, Apple in Cupertino, Nvidia in Santa Clara, Cooley in Palo Alto, Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, Pixar in Emeryville. X closed its San Francisco headquarters in August 2024 and moved staff to San Jose and Palo Alto. The hills are not a figure of speech either. Bradford Street in Bernal Heights hits a 41% grade above Tompkins Avenue, Romolo runs 37.5% and Prentiss 37%, and the 1100 block of Filbert between Hyde and Leavenworth is 31.5%. Combine that with street parking that is scarce, metered and time-limited, and load-in becomes a real part of scheduling rather than an afterthought.

What we make for San Francisco 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 are based in St. Louis and fly to San Francisco for this work. There is no San Francisco office, address or local phone number, and we think that is the honest version of what a traveling photographer is. What it buys a client is consistency: the same person shoots your Financial District floor, your Peninsula lab and your South Bay engineering office, so the results match instead of merely coexisting. Travel and time are quoted as part of the project up front. Send dates, addresses and rough headcount and you get a plan back within one business day.

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San Francisco questions

What teams in this market usually ask first.

You are based in St. Louis. How does a San Francisco shoot actually work?▼

We fly in the day before and scout the space, either in person or over video with someone on site beforehand. Gear travels with us, including lighting and backdrops, so nothing depends on a local rental house. A typical booking is one to three days on the ground, scheduled tightly enough to justify the trip. You get one photographer for the whole thing, not a rotating roster.

Can you cover our San Francisco office and our Peninsula or South Bay office on the same trip?▼

Yes, and that is usually the reason to bring us in. A company's Bay Area headcount is commonly split across the city, the Peninsula and the South Bay, and those offices are 20 to 50 miles apart. We build a route: city offices on one day, down the Peninsula the next, South Bay after that. Same lighting, same backdrop, same retouching, so the whole staff directory reads as one set. Travel between sites is planned around commute direction rather than mileage.

How do you move equipment around San Francisco?▼

Carefully, and with the building involved early. Most towers require a loading dock reservation, a certificate of insurance and a freight elevator window, and those are arranged before the shoot rather than on arrival. We pack to move in a small number of cases so a two-person load-in works. Street parking is scarce and metered, and grades like Filbert's 31.5% block make curbside staging a real consideration. Larger productions that need reserved street space go through Film SF, where a commercial or corporate media permit runs $300 per day and covers production vehicle parking, with postings placed 24 to 72 hours ahead by a city-approved vendor and SFMTA sign-off for anything touching roads, bus routes, cable cars or meters. A headshot day in a conference room needs none of that.

Which airport should we plan around?▼

It depends on where your offices are. SFO is about 13 miles south of downtown San Francisco, with BART from the International Terminal reaching downtown in roughly 30 minutes, so SFO plus BART through Embarcadero and Montgomery stations serves the city districts well. For the Peninsula, SFO connects by free AirTrain to the Millbrae Intermodal Station and Caltrain. Oakland is less than 20 miles from downtown San Francisco by BART to Coliseum station plus the people mover, which suits East Bay work. San Jose is about 50 miles southeast of downtown San Francisco and is the closest airport to the Silicon Valley municipalities, not to the city.

Can you do photo and video in the same visit?▼

Yes. Most trips combine them, because flying a crew across the country for stills alone and again for video wastes a day of your people's time as well as ours. A common pattern is headshots in the morning, environmental and team frames after lunch, then executive interviews and b-roll in the afternoon when the floor is quieter. We tell you in advance which combinations need a second shooter or an audio operator and which do not.

Our existing headshots were made by someone else. Can you match them?▼

Usually, and it is worth asking for. Send five or six existing files and we will read the lighting pattern, background tone, crop and retouching level, then match them closely enough that new hires do not stand out on the leadership page. Sometimes the honest answer is that the old standard is not worth preserving, in which case we will say so and propose a look you can hold to for years instead. Either way the decision is made before the shoot, not in the edit.

How far ahead should we book?▼

Three to six weeks is comfortable for a standard office visit, since it leaves room for building access, dock reservations and a scheduling grid your staff can actually sign up for. Conference weeks are the exception and should be booked earlier: Dreamforce in September and the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January fill San Francisco hotels and compress everyone's calendar. Shorter notice is sometimes possible depending on flights. Send dates and we will confirm availability within one business day.

Working in San Francisco?

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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