Client: Fednav Limited Mandate: Employer branding photography, Montreal headquarters Scope: Executive portraits, employee headshots, workplace and architectural photography — full day, dual-studio setup

The Assignment

Fednav is one of Canada's largest privately held shipping companies. It operates a fleet of oceangoing and Great Lakes vessels, connects ports across four continents, and has done so from its headquarters in downtown Montreal for decades. When an organization of that scale turns its attention to how it presents itself to the people it wants to hire — and to the people already working there — the visual requirement is specific: show the institution, show the people, and make both feel worth joining.

The mandate was employer branding. That meant executive portraits for the senior leadership, consistent headshots for a broader group of employees, and a curated set of workplace and architectural images that could carry the company's identity across its website, recruitment materials, and internal communications.

Two Audiences. Two Setups. One Boardroom.

The challenge with an employer branding assignment at an organization like Fednav is that the visual brief is, in effect, two briefs running in parallel.

Senior leaders — Directors, Vice-Presidents, the CEO — need portraits that read as authoritative. The environment matters. A seamless background suitable for volume headshots doesn't carry the same weight for a C-suite portrait as a window with a view of Montreal does. At the same time, the employee headshots need to be consistent: clean, professional, repeatable, immune to distraction. You can't solve both requirements with one setup.

The solution was a two-studio configuration installed in one of Fednav's spacious boardrooms. The first was a window position facing south, with the wooded face of Mount Royal as a natural, city-specific backdrop. Senior executive portraits were made here. The second setup was a portable grey seamless, lit to deliver the uniform, neutral output that holds up across a website directory or an all-staff email, where consistency across mulitple employee faces matters more than any individual creative decision.

Scheduling was built around the organization's day, not the other way around. Senior leaders came first or in blocks between commitments. Staff sessions ran continuously in the seamless setup. Both studios operated simultaneously when volume required it.

The Office as a Subject

The portrait work was one part of the mandate. The other was the office itself.

Fednav's Montreal headquarters is a genuinely distinctive space. The main reception connects to an upper floor via a spiral staircase — the kind of architectural feature that communicates something about how a company thinks about itself. Throughout the offices, exact scale-model replicas of ships from Fednav's active fleet are displayed: a physical record of the company's history and geographic reach, present in the workspace where people make decisions about those ships every day.

Beyond the architecture and the artifacts, the offices offer views that most Montreal workplaces don't: the cafeteria looks south over the St. Lawrence River and the south shore. Elsewhere in the building, panoramic windows frame downtown Montreal. Staff have access to private lockers and a dedicated coffee station — the kinds of details that matter in employer branding photography because they answer the unspoken question any candidate has when they look at a company's website: what does it actually feel like to work here?

The documentation of the space followed the portrait work: a methodical tour, shooting the staircase, the ship models, the river views, the common areas. Not as a real estate exercise — as a character study of the institution.

The Lifestyle Layer

Alongside the architectural documentation, the day included a series of lifestyle sequences: employees at their desks working alone, in conversation with colleagues, in informal meetings, engaged with screens and documents. The approach was documentary rather than art-directed. The goal was to capture work as it actually happens at Fednav — not to recreate a stock photo library in a real office.

The distinction matters. Staged workplace photography tends to look staged. Buyers of visual assets for recruitment — HR teams, communications directors — know immediately when images have been produced rather than observed. The most useful images in an employer branding library are the ones where the subject is clearly a real person doing a real thing, in a real place that belongs to them.

Results

Outcome

8

20

350

2 weeks

Fednav website, LinkedIn profiles, recruitment ads, internal, external publications

What This Means for Your Organization

A one-studio setup handles either the executive portrait work or the volume headshots reasonably well. It doesn't handle both simultaneously, and it leaves the architectural and lifestyle work to be scheduled around portrait slots — which usually means it gets compressed or cut.

Running two studios in parallel, with a disciplined session schedule and a dedicated block for the office and lifestyle work, produces a complete employer branding library in a single working day. The organization absorbs one day of light disruption. The result is a cohesive set of images — portraits, headshots, interiors, and lifestyle — that reads as a single visual identity rather than a collection of assets made at different times with different sensibilities.

That's the difference between employer branding photography and corporate photography that happens to include some portraits.

Julian Haber Photography has delivered employer branding visual assets for organizations across financial services, technology, life sciences, and international affairs. If you're preparing for a headcount photography day, a leadership portrait update, or a full employer branding campaign, I'd be happy to have a quick discussion about what your project requires.