Client: Intact Insurance Mandate: Consistent Employee Portraits for Company-wide IT Department Scope: 6 offices across Quebec & Ontario, two-weeks, 200+ portraits
The Assignment
Intact Insurance is one of Canada's largest property and casualty insurers, with operations spanning the country and a workforce that runs into the thousands. When the company's communications team wanted to offer employees across the IT department a professional portrait experience — part recognition, part engagement — the project needed to reach every level of the team, in every office they occupied.
The mandate: travel to each location, establish an onsite studio, and give every member of the IT department the same quality of portrait session. Two offices in Montreal, one in Laval, one in Saint-Hyacinthe, one in Quebec City, and one in Toronto. Over 200 business headshots in total, from frontline technical staff to senior management.
The Challenge
The idea was straightforward: give employees a moment of individual recognition through a professional portrait they could be proud of. The execution was not.
No two offices present the same conditions. Available rooms differ in size, ceiling height, wall colour, and ambient light. Natural light enters from different angles — or not at all. What reads as clean and polished in one boardroom becomes flat or colour-shifted three cities away.
For the experience to feel equitable — for a developer in Laval to receive the same quality of session as a VP in Toronto — the technical standard had to hold regardless of what each location offered. The portrait was the recognition. If the quality varied by office, the gesture would feel uneven.
The Approach
The solution was a fully portable, self-contained lighting system brought to every location. The same modifiers, the same ratios, the same camera settings — replicated precisely from the first setup to the last. Ambient light was controlled or eliminated at each site. The background was standardized.
Before photographing a single subject, each room was assessed and the setup adjusted to neutralize whatever the space presented. A window throwing hard light from the left in Saint-Hyacinthe requires a different blocking strategy than a windowless interior office in Toronto. The goal at every location was not to work with the room — it was to make the room irrelevant.
Scheduling across six offices was coordinated in advance. Staff rotated through in groups, keeping the session efficient and minimizing disruption to the working day. Every subject — regardless of title — received the same direction, the same attention, and the same amount of time. The result is a portrait library where no individual can tell, from the image alone, which city they were photographed in.
The Deliverables
More than 200 retouched employee portraits, delivered as a cohesive set covering the full IT department. Uniform lighting, consistent framing, and a single visual standard across all six locations — suitable for use across Intact's internal platforms, organizational communications, and individual professional profiles without further editing or adjustment.
Results
Offices Visited
6 offices across Quebec & Ontario within a 14-day window.
Image delivery
5 minute session intervals per employee, capture, review with client, approve
The Outcome
- 200 individual portraits taken
- Each individual employee given chance to review and approve image immediately
- Edited final images delivered within 2 weeks
- All images standardizeed for lighting, colour tone and crop
Employees adopted the portraits widely — across internal directories, team pages, organizational communications, and in many cases their own LinkedIn profiles. What began as a recognition initiative became Intact's de facto visual standard for the department.
The quality of the work and the simplicity of the process led to a repeat engagement. Intact rehired Julian Haber Photography the following year for additional portrait sessions, and subsequently for employer branding days — a broader mandate covering workplace culture, team dynamics, and recruitment-oriented visual assets.
"We brought Julian back the following year because the first project was that straightforward. Same quality, no learning curve, no surprises."
What This Means for Your Organization
A company-wide portrait session does two things at once. It gives you a consistent, professional set of visual assets — for directories, internal platforms, and public-facing communications — and it gives your employees a moment of individual recognition. The session itself becomes an engagement event: a signal that the organization values the people in it enough to invest in how they're represented.
The format scales to any team size and works across multiple offices. Every subject receives the same quality of session regardless of location or role.
Looking for consistent corporate headshots across multiple offices or a distributed team? I'd be happy to discuss your requirements.