Steve Ridzon Photography

Environmental portraits provide a sense of space and give an opportunity for subjects to interact with their environments. This allows for more creativity in posing and gives more overall depth to the image.

If your office is aesthetically pleasing, has a fair amount of natural light and offers wider shooting angles, this might be the best option for your company.

Studio portraits allow for precise control of lighting and can provide consistency across multiple employees and office locations. By eliminating any environmental “noise”, the focus remains on the subject, allowing for both drama and simplicity.

If you can’t make it to my studio in Annapolis, I’m more than happy to bring my studio to you!

Lets face it: offices aren’t always the most aesthetically-pleasing spaces. But what if you still want the environmental “look” but don’t have the ideal location? Composite portraits might be a good workaround.

For these portraits, all subjects are photographed on a white background and then merged with a separately-photographed background (or stock photo, if so desired).

Not only is this great for less-than-ideal office locations, it also is less invasive on your overall space than true environmental portraits. No need to block off multiple conference rooms or have clients/employees avoiding roving photo equipment.

One thing to keep in mind with this option is that it is not a perfect replacement for true environmental portraits. There is no ability for subjects to interact with their surroundings and images can lack the realism of undoctored portraits. But it still often provides the most desirable result for many companies.

Sure, stock photography looks great and might check off a lot of the creative boxes, but do you really want to use an image that hundreds of other companies are probably already using? And if you’re like me, you can probably sniff out an imposter pretty quickly. A website that is littered with obvious stock photos might look stylish, but can come across as makeshift and disingenuous.

Why not build up a portfolio of your own images, with your own employees to use wherever and whenever you want?

Whether you’re a multi-national corporation or a local Mom & Pop shop, it’s imperative to have professional images of your space to let clients and customers know you mean business. I’ve handled interior and exterior shoots for large corporations, restaurants, museums, realtors and even one-room yoga studios.

Annapolis certainly isn’t the most bustling political town, but it has always had it’s fair share powerful visitors. Plus, being so close to Washington, DC has afforded me the privilege of being hired for several shoots on “The Hill”.

I just finished up a comprehensive set of testimonial videos for United Educators (UE) in Bethesda, MD! With about 1,600 members ranging from large university systems to small, independent K-12 schools, UE helps educational institutions identify, prevent, respond to, and recover from adversity and risks, enabling them to advance their mission.

We set up quick, on-location interviews with UE clients and employees over the span of several weeks and created dozens of individual testimonials as well as longer videos that combine several participants. Check them out on Vimeo here!

Just wrapped up a great food menu shoot at Full On Craft Eats & Drinks in Rockville, MD! This amazing sandwich shop cooks everything from scratch and offers 25 original sandwiches and dozens of other unique offerings. They are getting ready to expand to the Annapolis area and the team wanted some new photos for an upcoming web refresh.

I just finished up an awesome food photography shoot for Dogfish Head Alehouses, a group of three popular restaurants in the Washington, DC area. People already know about their beer, but they actually have a really amazing food menu that they wanted to better highlight. So we spent a full day photographing dozens of menu items (along with a few beer cameos, of course)!

I was thrilled to be hired by the National Women’s Law Center in December to help them highlight the nation-wide benefits of the Childcare & Development Block Grant (CCDBC). The CCDBG provides federal funding to states for child care subsidies for low-income families with children under age 13, as well as flexibility to pair state and federal funds to improve the quality of child care available to families within existing state and local systems.

It was my job to travel to various child care centers across the country to document each location’s unique utilization of grant funding. Over a two-week span, I found myself in New York, Louisiana, Maine, Arizona and Kansas!

Steve Ridzon Photography handles a wide-range of on-location corporate video. From company profiles and recruiting videos to staff training and testimonials.