Twenty-Three People, One Full Day: Corporate Headshots in Damansara Heights
Client JIXE Events PLT (engaged and paid by JIXE; end client JTI Malaysia)
Location Corporate Tower 7, Pavilion Damansara Heights, Kuala Lumpur — on location
Date September 2025
Team 23 staff · 2 AVS crew
Session Full day
Delivered Headshots plus add-on environmental portraits, 1–2 weeks
Investment RM6k - 8k
Nine people is a morning. Twenty-three people is a logistics exercise that starts three weeks before anyone picks up a camera.
This is the shoot we point to when a company asks what actually goes into a large team session — because almost none of the difficulty is photographic.
How this job actually came to us
Worth being clear about the arrangement, because it's a common one and it's a large part of how we work.
JIXE Events was our client. We were engaged and paid by JIXE. JTI was JIXE's client.
JIXE is a Kuala Lumpur event management company, and they'd brought us in the year before for a 37-person headshot session for the same end client. That first booking came through a simple enquiry form on this website, after a Google search.
We mention that because it's the honest version of how most corporate work arrives. Not through a pitch. Someone had a problem, searched for a solution, found a studio that looked like it could handle the scale, and sent a message.
Coming back the second year is the part that counts.
A good share of our corporate work reaches us this way — through event planners, organisers, PR and communications agencies who've been asked for photography as part of a larger brief and need a studio that can execute it without becoming their problem. It suits us. The planner already understands the client's expectations, the timeline and the politics; we handle the part we're good at.
The makeup maths nobody explains upfront
Here's the calculation that decides the shape of your entire day, and most companies only discover it halfway through planning.
Full hair and makeup takes about 45 minutes per person.
For a team of 23, that is over 17 hours of chair time. Two makeup artists working in parallel still puts you well past a single working day, before a single frame is shot.
So there's a trade-off, and it's worth making deliberately:
Full hair and makeup — around 45 minutes each. Excellent results. Realistic for small groups, senior leadership, or anything going into print.
Light touch-up — around 15 minutes each. Shine control, minor evening-out, a quick tidy. Lets you move 20 to 30 people through in a day comfortably.
For this session, one person had full makeup in the morning and everyone else handled their own, which is completely normal and worked fine. When a client wants consistency across a larger group, the light touch-up model is almost always the right answer — it's the difference between finishing in a day and spreading over three.
If you're planning a session for more than fifteen people, decide this before you book anything else. It determines the crew you need, the room you need, and how many days you're committing your team to.
Getting into the building is half the job
JTI's office sits in Corporate Tower 7 at Pavilion Damansara Heights. Excellent building. Not a simple one to load into.
Anyone who works around Damansara Heights knows the traffic, and we needed to be set up and tested before staff arrived — which meant arriving between 7 and 8am, straight into the morning build-up.
Then there's the equipment. We arrive with lighting stands, modifiers, backdrop, cases and a trolley. That doesn't go up in the passenger lift. It goes through the loading bay, and access to the loading bay lift requires permission arranged in advance with building management.
So we did what we always do for a corporate tower: we went and looked first. A site recce before the shoot date — where the loading bay is, which lift, who signs us in, how long it takes to get from the bay to the floor, where we're actually setting up.
It sounds excessive for a photography job. It isn't. A crew stuck in a loading bay without a permit at 7:30am is a crew that starts an hour late, and on a full-day session with 23 people booked into slots, an hour late never gets recovered. Every subsequent slot slides, and the person at the end of the list gets a rushed session.
The recce costs an afternoon. It has never once not been worth it.
The room we were given
The office itself was a genuine surprise — a boutique, considered workspace, not the standard corporate grid. We'd have happily shot portraits in half a dozen corners of it.
What we were allocated was the AV room. That's normal, and usually sensible; it's the one space that can be closed off without disrupting anyone's work.
The constraint there was ceiling height, which limits how high you can position a light and therefore the angle it falls at. We built a two-light setup that worked within it. Lower ceilings are one of the most common on-location constraints in modern office towers and there are ways around them — the answer is rarely to give up and shoot flat.
Running a list of 23
Vivien at JIXE had the name list organised and the running order set before we arrived, and that single piece of preparation is the difference between a smooth day and a chaotic one. People knew their slot. Nobody sat waiting. We worked straight down the list.
Two people missed their slot. On an international company's shoot, someone always does — travel gets rearranged at short notice, meetings overrun, someone is suddenly in Singapore.
This is not a problem, and it shouldn't be treated as one. Anyone who misses an on-location session can come to our Subang Jaya studio afterwards and be photographed against the same background with the same lighting. The finished set stays consistent. Nobody ends up as the one person on the website shot against a different wall in a different year.
Worth asking any photographer you're briefing: what happens to the people who miss it? If they don't have a clean answer, you'll find out the hard way.
Formal, then candid
The brief asked for a formal frame and a candid frame for each person — the same instinct we're seeing across professional services clients, and a good one. Formal for the annual report and the corporate directory. Candid for LinkedIn, internal comms and anywhere a human being reads better than an institution.
Formal frames moved quickly on this shoot, largely because the team dressed well. That sounds trivial and it isn't: a well-fitted jacket photographs cleanly, sits properly on the shoulders and needs almost no adjustment between frames. When a company has a strong dress culture, you feel it in the pace of the day.
The candid frames took longer and were the more enjoyable half. One of the leadership team in particular was completely game — we worked through a long run of variations with him, and the loose frames from that stretch were among the best of the day.
Full-day sessions break around midday. We picked up again after 2pm.
The unplanned part: environmental portraits
This wasn't in the plan.
Partway through the day, Vivien asked whether we could also shoot some environmental portraits — people photographed in the workspace itself rather than against a backdrop. Given how good the office looked, it was an obvious idea.
The building has large windows, so rather than lighting it like a studio we worked with the daylight and used strobes to lift and shape it. The result reads as natural light rather than a lit portrait: the room stays in the frame, the window stays soft rather than blown out, and the subject doesn't look pasted in.
The client was very happy with these, and they've become one of the things we now suggest to any company with a workspace worth showing. A headshot tells someone what you look like. An environmental portrait tells them where you work and what kind of place it is — which, for recruitment and company profile pages, is often the more useful image.
If your office is worth photographing, add half an hour and shoot some. It's a small add-on to a session you're already paying for, and it produces images you'll use in places a headshot can't go.
Delivery
Headshots and environmental portraits delivered within one to two weeks — a longer window than a small session, which is what a 23-person set with two image types per person reasonably takes.
Planning a large team session? A short checklist
Decide makeup early — full (45 min each) or light touch-up (15 min each). This determines everything else.
Book the room, not just the day. A closable space you control beats a nicer space you share.
Send the photographer to recce the building — loading bay, lift access, permits, security sign-in.
Assign someone to own the name list and the running order. It is the highest-leverage thing anyone does.
Agree upfront what happens to no-shows. There will be some.
Ask about environmental portraits if your workspace is worth showing.
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A meaningful part of our corporate work comes through planners and organisers rather than direct from the end client — this project included. If you're being asked for photography as part of a wider brief, we're set up to be the studio behind it.
What working with us looks like:
We work to your client, under your management. You own the relationship. We turn up, execute, and hand the files to you. We don't go around a partner to their client, on this job or the next one.
Fast, clear quotes for your proposals. Give us headcount, location and deliverables and you'll get a figure you can build a proposal around, not a conversation that takes a week.
We handle the boring parts ourselves. Site recce, loading bay access, building permits, security sign-in, crew scheduling. You shouldn't have to project-manage your photographer.
We scale. Nine people in a meeting room, twenty-three across a full day, thirty-seven over multiple sessions, or a rolling headshot booth at a conference. Same consistency across all of them.
Consistency is our problem, not yours. Anyone who misses a session gets photographed later at our Subang Jaya studio against the same background and lighting. The finished set matches.
Discretion where it's needed. Some clients don't want their name on anyone's portfolio. That's fine — we ask before we publish anything, every time.
We work regularly with event management companies, PR and communications agencies, internal comms teams and HR consultancies across the Klang Valley.
If you have a brief that needs a photography partner — headshots, event coverage, conference headshot booths, office and environmental portraits — we'd like to hear about it.