Commercial Photography Disciplines: Briefs, Kit and Output

Stills work is booked by discipline, and each discipline carries its own kit, pace and deliverable count. The word photography covers a corporate portrait session running twelve people through a meeting room in an afternoon and a food shoot where a single plate occupies two hours, and nothing about the second is a scaled-up version of the first. The entries below record each discipline as the trade uses the term: what the brief has to specify, what happens on the day, and what leaves at the end.

Three things separate one discipline from another in practice, and none of them is subject matter. The first is who else has to be there. A headshot sitting is a photographer and a subject. A fashion frame is a photographer, a stylist, hair and makeup, an assistant and frequently a digital operator, and the picture cannot be taken until all of them have done their part. The second is what has to be controlled. Product and food work control light and surface completely and are therefore largely indifferent to weather and daylight, while architectural, real estate and location work are timed around the sun and lose the day when it does not appear. The third is how many finished files the brief asks for, which is the variable that decides how much of the work happens after the shoot rather than during it.

A commercial stills brief resolves to four lines, and a brief missing any of them is incomplete rather than concise. The first is the shot list, or at minimum the count of distinct setups the shoot has to produce. The second is the number of finished, retouched files to be delivered, which is a separate number from the shot list and usually a smaller one. The third is the scope of use: where the pictures will appear, for how long, and in which territories. The fourth is the date, because a stills unit is small enough to be booked quickly and location access rarely is.

Retouching deserves naming rather than assuming, because the word covers two different classes of labour. Correction is the removal of things that were not meant to be in the frame and the balancing of colour and exposure across a set, and it is ordinary post- production on any commercial job. Reconstruction changes what the photograph asserts: composited backgrounds, altered proportions, objects added or removed. The first is priced by the set, the second by the frame, and the conventions differ sharply by discipline. A casting portrait is retouched restrainedly on purpose, because the picture is a promise about who will walk into the room. A packaging still is built to a specification and reconstruction is expected.

Consistency is the requirement that most often goes unstated and most often causes trouble later. A single portrait is a picture; a staff directory is a system that has to survive people joining and leaving for years. That means the lighting, background, crop and processing all have to be repeatable months later, by the same photographer or by a different one, and repeatability is a thing that has to be written down at the first session rather than reconstructed at the third.

Each entry below documents one discipline: who is normally present, what the day is organised around, and what the deliverable is. No prices are stated anywhere in this reference. A session fee is meaningless without the setups, the licence and the file count it covers, and an averaged figure is not something a reader can check. Where a number is genuinely needed, the documents worth reading are the public and dated ones: the municipal tariff that sets permit fees for a location, and the published rate agreements that cover engaged crew and performers.