Inside a Corporate Lifestyle Photography Shoot for TikTok's NYC Office
In competitive hiring markets, especially in cities like New York, employer branding isn’t a luxury. It’s a recruiting essential. The way your company presents itself online directly influences the talent you attract and how your culture is perceived, long before a single interview takes place.
When TikTok approached us about creating a corporate lifestyle photography library for their #LifeAtTikTok recruiting platform, the goal wasn’t just to create attractive images. It was to support a refreshed employer branding platform — one that would help attract top-tier employees and visually embody their mission and values.
In this case study, I’ll walk through how we approached the shoot strategically, how we balanced authenticity with direction, and what makes corporate lifestyle photography actually work in a recruiting context.
The Brief: Bringing #LifeAtTikTok to Life
TikTok’s employer branding team reached out to us to assist with a refresh of the visual assets for their recruiting site. Their #LifeAtTikTok domain serves as a dedicated recruiting platform — a window into what life at the company actually looks like for prospective hires. We were brought in to update the assets of their NYC office in Times Square.
I spent time reviewing their recruiting page, familiarizing myself with their tone, visual language, and the stories they're trying to tell.
TikTok's mission of "inspiring creativity and bringing joy" was an immediate signal about the tone we'd need to strike. Their ByteStyles reinforced that further — values like "Grow Together," "Champion Diversity and Inclusion," and "Always Day 1" painted a picture of a company that wanted to be seen as collaborative, energetic, and genuinely inclusive.
That gave us a clear creative direction before a single conversation had taken place: the imagery needed to feel alive, diverse, and fun in a way that was specific to TikTok's identity and positioning.
We outlined a framework built around those specific goals, which included:
directed scenes that illustrate their values in action
orchestrated candid moments that capture the texture of daily life at the company
informal portraits that humanize the varied ByteStyle themes
behind-the-scenes content that highlights TikTok's creative process from the inside
video b-roll and short interviews that serve as social content for recruiting
We then met with the employer branding team to talk through the creative and put a plan in place.
Why Corporate Lifestyle Photography Matters More Than Ever
Before getting into the logistics of the shoot, it's worth stepping back to talk about why this kind of investment matters in the first place.
Corporate lifestyle photography — and employer branding imagery more broadly — has evolved from a nice-to-have into an essential modern-day recruiting tool. The talent market is competitive, and candidates today do their research.
Before a first-round interview, most candidates have already formed an opinion of your company based on what they've found online. Your Glassdoor page. Your LinkedIn. And increasingly, a dedicated careers site or employer branding hub like the one TikTok runs.
The numbers back this up. According to Glassdoor, 83% of job seekers research company reviews and ratings before deciding where to apply — and 53% actively seek out more information about a company after reading a job posting. These aren't passive observers. They're investigators, forming detailed impressions of your culture long before they submit a resume.
What those candidates are looking for isn't a polished corporate facade. They're looking for authenticity. They want to understand the culture, the people, the day-to-day texture of working somewhere. Built In's 2024 Culture Report found that 61% of employees would leave their current job for a company with a better culture.
This finding underscores how much culture shapes decisions not just at the point of hiring, but throughout an employee's tenure. Stock photography can't communicate that. Generic headshots against a white wall can't communicate that. What does it is real imagery — real employees, real spaces, real moments — captured with intention.
The companies that invest in this kind of photography aren't just filling a website with visuals. They're making a statement about how they see their people, and how seriously they take the employee experience.
Planning the Shoot: Where the Real Work Happens
The most important part of a corporate lifestyle photography project happens before anyone picks up a camera. The pre-production phase is where you define what success looks like — and the more clearly you can define it, the better the final images will serve their purpose.
This is true anywhere, but it's especially true in a city like New York, where shoot days are expensive and logistically complex, and time lost on the day is hard to recover.
Start with a Creative Brief
After the initial conversations, TikTok's team put together a creative brief. We actively encourage this for every project of similar scale, and it's worth building into your process if you're on the client side planning a shoot of your own.
A good creative brief doesn't need to be a 40-page document. What it does need to answer is: What are these images for, and what do they need to communicate?
In TikTok's case, that meant identifying which sections of the refreshed website would use which kinds of images, what aspect ratios were needed for different placements, and where copy would be laid over the image — which changes how you need to shoot the frame entirely.
Images that will carry marketing copy need to be composed differently than images that stand alone. Specifically, they need intentional negative space — areas of the frame that are relatively empty and visually calm — so that text can be placed there without competing with the subject.
This is something to brief your photographer on explicitly, and something to plan shot-by-shot if possible. Arriving at a shoot and deciding retroactively which images will get copy overlaid leads to compromises. Knowing in advance lets you be deliberate about it.
Align on the Story You're Telling
TikTok had a clear sense of their employer value proposition and the kind of talent they were trying to attract. That clarity was enormously helpful. The images we were creating weren't generic "people at work" photos — they were designed to speak to a specific kind of candidate and reflect specific company values.
TikTok's mission — to "inspire creativity and bring joy" — gave us an immediate creative compass. A shoot for a fintech company or a law firm would call for a very different visual register. Here, the imagery needed to feel energetic, expressive, and genuinely fun.
Their core values, which they call ByteStyles, reinforced this further: principles like "Champion Diversity and Inclusion," "Grow Together," and "Always Day 1" — an ethos of staying entrepreneurial, curious, and open — shaped not just which moments we tried to capture, but the mood we tried to create on set. You can't photograph an idea, but you can create the conditions that make it visible.
When you're planning your own shoot, ask yourself:
Who is the ideal person we're trying to reach, and what speaks to them? Note: this may look very different from your client / user base.
What do we want someone to feel when they land on this page?
Which aspects of our culture are we most proud of, and how do we embody those things through imagery?
You don't need airtight answers to all of these before the shoot. A lot of the best moments will happen organically. But having a directional answer shapes the setups you plan, the people you involve, and the energy you bring to the day.
Scouting the Location
For the TikTok project, we built a dedicated location scout day into the proposal. This is something we recommend for any shoot taking place in an office environment, particularly in New York City where commercial spaces tend to be dense, busy, and logistically complex.
A scout day lets us walk every space you're planning to use before the shoot, identify the best angles and lighting conditions at different times of day, and flag anything that needs to be addressed — meeting rooms reserved, furniture moved, equipment stored out of frame, how time of day affects lighting throughout the office.
It also lets us develop a shot list tied to specific locations, which you can then share with your internal coordinator so the right people are ready and available in each space at the right time.
The alternative — figuring all of this out on the day of the shoot — burns time you don't have and creates stress that can impact the final images.
Handle the NYC-Specific Logistics Early
Shooting in a Manhattan commercial office comes with its own set of administrative requirements that are easy to underestimate. For the TikTok office, as with most commercial buildings in New York City, we needed to submit a Certificate of Insurance to the building's management company before any equipment could come through the door.
Professional photographers working in commercial spaces carry a host of different insurance policies for exactly this reason — and if you're hiring a photographer for a shoot in an NYC office building, confirming they carry appropriate coverage and can produce a COI on request is a practical step worth taking early.
Freight elevator access is another consideration that's easy to overlook. In most Manhattan commercial buildings, production equipment — lighting, cases, stands — needs to enter and exit via the freight elevator rather than the main passenger lifts.
Freight elevators often have booking windows and may need to be reserved in advance. Getting this organized ahead of time avoids a bottleneck on shoot day when you're trying to get set up quickly.
None of this is complicated, but it does need to happen in advance. Leaving it to the last minute creates friction that ripples through the whole day.
The Shoot Itself: What We Captured
With pre-production in place, the shoot day itself was focused on building out a comprehensive library of corporate lifestyle photography assets across several categories.
One of the central challenges of this kind of work is to balance authentically representing life at a company without actually disrupting the workday to do it.
Employees have meetings, deadlines, and responsibilities — the shoot has to work around all of that. In practice, this means that many of the scenes that look candid and spontaneous are actually carefully staged. The goal isn't to manufacture something fake; it's to create the conditions for something real to happen within a controlled setup.
Casting the scenes is where this starts. For each setup, we worked with the employer branding team to recruit a group of employee volunteers — ideally a mix of people that reflects the genuine diversity of the organization in terms of backgrounds, roles, and experience levels.
For TikTok, whose ByteStyles include "Champion Diversity and Inclusion" as a core value, getting this right was key. Candidates who land on the #LifeAtTikTok page and see themselves reflected in the imagery are far more likely to envision themselves thriving there — and that's ultimately what the whole exercise is for.
Once we had our participants for each setup, the goal is then to create situations that look and feel organic rather than clearly having been staged for the photo. This is where strong direction is key.
For team portraits, our aim was to crate something playful and relaxed. Given TikTok’s loose and fun culture, we had a lot of latitude on the kinds of shots we could create.
The specific setups ranged from an internal brainstorming session staged in one of the conference rooms we'd scouted, to casual coworking scenes, to more playful moments — a group of employees goofing around on a couch in front of the TikTok logo, another group taking a fun selfie in front of the same backdrop.
Those branded-environment shots are particularly valuable for a company like TikTok because they anchor the imagery to the brand without feeling like a logo placement.
Each of these setups was chosen with the ByteStyles in mind. The brainstorming scene speaks directly to "Seek Truth and Be Pragmatic" and "Be Courageous and Aim for the Highest" — values that are about intellectual rigor and pushing for the best outcome, which are hard to articulate in copy but immediately legible in an image of engaged, energized people working through ideas together.
The more casual, playful scenes reflect "Grow Together" and the broader mission of inspiring creativity and joy — they show a workplace where people genuinely like each other and bring energy to their work. That's not something you can say in a job posting. You have to show it.
A few directing techniques are worth flagging for anyone planning a similar shoot. For wider scenes where the goal is to make a space feel alive and inhabited, incorporating movement in the background makes an enormous difference.
Having people walk through the frame on a loop — simulating the natural flow of people moving through a workplace — transforms what would otherwise be a static tableau into something that reads as a genuine moment in a living, breathing office.
Wardrobe is another detail that's easy to overlook. We communicated dress expectations to participating employees in advance, so that everyone showed up in attire that reflected the aesthetic and standards of the company.
This sounds minor, but it has a real impact on the cohesion of the final images. A quick brief to employees ahead of the shoot day takes five minutes and saves significant headaches in post.
The Headshot Session: A Detail Worth Getting Right
One element of the project that I think is worth highlighting separately is the headshot session we ran alongside the broader lifestyle content.
Employer branding photography and corporate headshots are often treated as separate projects, but combining them within a single corporate lifestyle photography engagement makes a lot of sense.
The team is already assembled. The lighting setup can be adapted rather than rebuilt from scratch. And having fresh, consistent headshots ready to pair with the lifestyle content gives the employer branding team much more flexibility in how they use the final assets.
This is not just a practical bonus; it ensures that you’ll come away with maximum value from your investment.
For TikTok, the headshot style was deliberately different from what you'd find at a law firm or financial institution. The tone was relaxed, the backdrops were on-brand, and the overall feel matched the company's creative identity. This is something that gets overlooked more often than it should: your headshots should match the tone of your brand.
The same thinking applies to diversity in who you feature. Harvard Business Review research found that employees in genuinely inclusive workplaces show a 50% lower risk of turnover and a 56% increase in job performance — and for candidates, seeing that diversity reflected authentically in your imagery is often the first signal of whether those values are real.
A creative agency and an investment bank should not have the same headshots. The style, the backdrop, the direction you give to subjects — all of it should reflect the personality and culture of the specific organization.
The additional benefit of including headshots in a project like this is what it signals to employees. People appreciate having a professional, current headshot they can actually use — on LinkedIn, in press materials, in internal directories. It's a small but meaningful gesture that demonstrates a real investment in your employees and generates goodwill.
Putting It All Together: What Makes Corporate Lifestyle Photography Work
The final deliverable was a library of images covering the full range of content that the #LifeAtTikTok refresh required — wide environmental shots built to work as hero images, thoughtfully composed portraits, branded moments in front of the TikTok logo, and the kind of candid in-between frames that make a workplace feel genuinely alive.
The employer branding team had what they needed to populate an entirely refreshed recruiting platform, with enough variety and range to work across different sections, formats, and use cases.
What made this project work wasn't any single decision — it was the accumulation of small ones. Reviewing the existing site before the first conversation. Asking about budget early. Building in a scout day. Getting a creative brief that mapped images to specific website placements. Briefing employees on wardrobe. Keeping the energy on set light enough that real expressions could happen.
None of these things are dramatic. All of them contributed to a shoot day that ran smoothly and a final gallery that delivered.
That's the through-line in any successful corporate lifestyle photography project. The images are the output. The thinking, the planning, and the communication that happen in advance are what make the images a success.
Put Your Brand To Work With Corporate Lifestyle Photography In NYC
Corporate lifestyle photography is one of the highest-impact investments you can make in how your brand presents itself to the world. Get in touch and let's talk about what your project needs.
