on the job: ballinger lifestyle shoot
Collaboration is at the core of my photography and business philosophies. No matter if I’m working with a new or returning client, a single person or a large business, it’s important to me to be a partner in the creative process. The team approach always produces the best results in my experience. When Ballinger reached out about working together a few weeks ago, it only took one look at their website for me to know we were a perfect match.
Ballinger — a nearly 150-year-old architecture firm in Philadelphia — was looking for some fresh lifestyle marketing images. Now, here’s where the collaboration bit comes in. We discussed spending a day at their offices in Center City and what that would look like. I went down to their offices to get a tour and see the spaces we’d be shooting in and talk about how we could best represent their company culture. We talked about how they could prepare beforehand and what they would be expecting after. We answered as many of each other’s questions as we could BEFORE the shoot day. That way, when we got to the shoot, there were no unanswered questions.
When the shoot day arrived, I entered their 14th floor offices and got to work.
Ballinger is an architecture design firm that specializes in collaboration between multiple design disciplines. Their core value is about looking at buildings as pieces to the puzzle instead of just big boxes that you fill up after they are built. They do that by bringing together a variety of designers—from architects to engineers to interior and exterior designers, all with differing backgrounds—to collaborate on a final product.
Their main tenet is the same as mine.
And boy did it show. When I got to the site, they were prepared and camera-ready. We photographed a few meetings, talked with designers about what they were working on, wandered around the offices to create some images of real people at work, and captured some details of the office to help tell the whole story. It was fun and productive day that authentically captured Ballinger’s greatest asset: it’s people.
