The most compelling brand photography often features the real people behind a company. Not stock talent, not aspirational models, but actual employees whose faces and expressions carry the genuine energy of the work they do. When Kaplan came to me to build out a comprehensive brand asset library, that was the brief: photograph real Kaplan employees across multiple locations, creating a library of imagery authentic enough to support every touchpoint in their marketing. It was a production that took us to Brooklyn and Fort Lauderdale, working across two distinct visual environments to capture the range and diversity of the Kaplan team.
The Asset Library Approach: Shooting for Versatility
Building a brand asset library is a different creative challenge from shooting a single campaign. A campaign has a fixed destination and a defined visual story. An asset library needs to serve dozens of future use cases that are not fully defined at the time of the shoot: images that will be cropped horizontally for a banner ad, vertically for social, pulled for a print brochure, featured on a product landing page. Every image needs to be designed with that versatility in mind.
For Kaplan's library, this meant creating images with intentional negative space for text overlay, shooting each scenario in multiple aspect ratios, and ensuring that the range of subjects, activities, and environments was broad enough to support the full scope of Kaplan's marketing needs. As a commercial photographer in New York experienced in brand asset creation, thinking about downstream use cases during the shoot is one of the most valuable things I bring to this kind of project.
Brooklyn: Urban Energy and Natural Light
The Brooklyn shoots gave us access to the kind of urban environment that communicates energy, modernity, and ambition, qualities that map well onto Kaplan's brand identity as a forward-looking education company. Working with real Kaplan employees in Brooklyn locations that felt like their actual world, rather than constructed studio sets, produced images with a natural confidence and authenticity that reads immediately as genuine.
Directing non-model talent, employees who are not professionally trained to perform in front of a camera, is a specialty skill that I have developed over years of shooting corporate and brand photography in New York. The goal is always to get people out of their heads and into a state of natural engagement: talking, working, interacting with each other in ways that produce expressions the camera can actually use.
Fort Lauderdale: A Different Visual Register
The Fort Lauderdale component of the Kaplan shoot gave us a distinctly different visual environment, warmer light, different architecture, the particular openness of a Florida setting that contrasts productively with New York's urban density. For a brand like Kaplan that serves students and professionals across the country, having imagery that reads as geographically diverse matters. The asset library needed to speak to a national audience, not just the New York market.
Shooting the same brand across two very different physical environments in a single production requires careful attention to stylistic consistency. Ensuring that the Brooklyn and Fort Lauderdale images feel like they belong in the same library despite their different backdrops. Lighting approach, color treatment, and compositional consistency are the tools that create that coherence when environments themselves are providing contrast.
Why Real Employee Photography Outperforms Stock
The case for photographing real employees rather than using stock imagery is both aesthetic and strategic. Aesthetically, real people have a specificity, a texture of face, a particular energy, a genuine relationship with the environment around them, that stock models cannot replicate. Strategically, real employee photography communicates authenticity and investment in a way that sophisticated audiences immediately recognize and respond to.
For education brands like Kaplan, where trust and credibility are fundamental to the customer relationship, this authenticity has direct commercial value. If you are a company looking to build a genuine brand asset library through on-location photography with your real team, in New York or beyond, I would love to discuss what that project could look like.
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External
Sigma / Travel the Alps with SIGMA’s Lightweight 18-50mm & 10-18mm Zoom Lenses
Sigma / Behind the Scenes on a Fashion Shoot with the Sigma BF
Sigma / Why I Choose SIGMA Zoom Lenses for Studio Photography
Sigma / A Fresh Look at Berlin Through the Sigma 12mm F1.4 DC Contemporary Lens