Case
Study

HOBY is an international organization with local chapters across each state in the US. They host leadership seminars for high school students, from local 1-day CLEWs, state-wide flagship weekend seminars, and national/international events that range from a few days to a week. I’ve been involved at various levels since I participated as a high school sophomore in the NY East seminar in Albany, NY. Since then, I’ve volunteered in various roles, including Public Relations with the NY East planning committee, Junior and Senior Group Facilitator, event photographer, social media, program assistant, and so on. I’ve photographed countless events since the early 2000s, including creating a slideshow to be played at closing ceremonies during the event, and photographing headshots of each staff member and group shots of the entire event and each smaller group division, at local, state and national levels. My images have been featured on HOBY international’s website, as well as the NY East chapter’s site and social media channels.

Project Overview

Discovery Phase

When Quantious was born from Kelley-Green Consulting, the company developed a whole new brand, including designing a new logo, website and more. This is when we came together to create branding photography.

Initially the request was simply for headshots of team members for the new website, however, through the discovery and creative development phase, we determined they would also additional imagery, both typical lifestyle images in the office and conceptual images illustrate an interesting and core concept in their brand and team identity: “super powers.”

Several Photo Shoots

Unsure how to convey the concept of individual super powers of team members, I suggested doing images of each staff member on a white background with props that represented their “power” and then using digital illustration (to be done by them) to add “magic” to the images.

The images would then be applied via a “rollover” effect on the website – on the team page, the more “standard” environmental headshots would appear natively, and the super power image would appear when the mouse cursor passes over the image. They loved the idea.

Images in Context

In the end, we completed a photo shoot including:

environmental headshots of several individuals – each in two locations: outdoors and in the office;
posed group photos;
environmental “action shots” of each team member at their work station/around the office;
set-up scenes/company culture shots, such as group meetings/skype calls, trainings, and virtual reality;
and the super powers photos – with complete mobile studio setup.