Education Photography FAQ

Drew Bird and our creative team have more than ten years experience photographing for school and education clients all over the world. We understand how to seamlessly blend into the school community in order to create images that communicate the genuine and unique quality of your students, teachers, faculty, and staff.

The director of marketing for one of our regular independent school clients put it this way, “Our brand has flourished. We have noticed that more families understand who we are as a community and they are drawn to us — this is in large part thanks to Drew Bird’s photography style. Through his photos, we continually see the truest, best versions of ourselves.”

View our client list below. We’ve worked with dozens of independent schools, private schools, public schools, universities, foundations, and education organizations.

We do photograph for independent schools, private schools, public schools, universities, colleges, philanthropic foundations, government agencies, and education companies. And, we also have a completely separate website and photography brand for commercial and editorial photography. You can view that website here. Our commercial and editorial clients include brands, corporations, magazines, news agencies, yoga studios, motion picture studios, outdoor adventure clothing brands, boutique coffee roasters, NBA Franchises, advertising agencies, branding firms, non-profit organizations, record labels, book publishers, and business in search of powerful and unique photography. In addition, we also have a wedding photojournalism brand that can be viewed here.

Yes. Here’s a link to a private gallery with a collection of recent school and education marketing projects that we’ve produced. When you get to the gallery, use your own email address to gain access.

Most of our independent school, private school, and university projects include two to five days of on campus photography. Of course, this can be fully customized to meet your needs. Generally, if your student body includes k-12 and between 300 and 1000 students, three days of photography is usually the right fit. That being said, every project is unique. After our initial consultation, we’ll be better able to give you our suggestion for the ideal number of photography days for your project.

For most school projects, one photographer is sufficient. For bigger schools with larger student bodies and multiple campus locations, adding additional photographers can often be the best solution. Multiple photographers will enable our creative team to be in different locations at the same time, so we can photograph more diversity in any one day.

In addition, if you want to add in headshots or professional portraits for your teachers and administrators, oftentimes including a second photographer is a great way to accomplish both the journalistic education marketing portion of the project and the headshots/portraits portion of the project in less time.

That being said, every project is unique. After our initial consultation, we’ll be better able to give you our suggestion for the ideal number of photographers for your project.

Yes. Absolutely. We have resumed a full photo schedule and we have developed some very comprehensive safety protocols based on the guidelines provided by the best available science from The State of California, The Centers For Disease Control, and the World Health Organization. Some of these guidelines include:

Pre-screening of all participants prior to the photo date(s)
Everyone must wear facemasks at all times when on site (exceptions made for those being photographed, of course)
Practice social distancing at all times whenever possible
Frequent hand sanitizing and washing
Frequent disinfecting of all surfaces on site
Air purifiers and ventilation for any indoor projects
Limiting the number of people inside the same room at any one time
Please ask us for the full list of protocols (there are more)

Yes.

Standard turn around time for most education marketing photography projects is 4 to 7 weeks. This really depends on the size and scale of your project.

We do offer same day instant delivery of images, which requires an on-site digital editor as part of our team.

We also offer premium rush delivery options for both 3 days after the project and 1 week after the project. Both of these include a rush ‘best of’ selection of edited and delivered images.

Final edited images are nearly always delivered via a digital download link sent to you via email.

Culling, editing, and optimizing of RAW files into final deliverable JPGs is a huge part of the creative storytelling process and is also very time intensive. For most projects, we will spend roughly 2 hours in post-production for every 1 hour of active photography time. So, a project that involved 10 hours of photography time will require roughly 20 hours of computer time to finish the photo story.

Editing and delivery timelines are customized based on the needs of your project. If you choose standard delivery: most education marketing projects have a turn around time of approximately 4 to 7 weeks. But this does depend on the scale of the project.

We also offer rush delivery options as a premium add-on to any photo package. These include options for 3 days after your project and 1 week after your project.

If you choose our Instant Same Day delivery and include an on-site editor, we’ll be able to deliver a best-of selection of finished images to you in near real-time during each day of photography. 

After the photography portion is complete: we will cull, edit, and optimize the final images.

Generally, we deliver about 100 final hi-res JPGs for every day that we photograph. The total number of images can be customized for any project. If you need or want a higher quantity of images, we can definitely accommodate. Images are delivered with marketing/advertising use rights for your school.