This spring I spent time on and off campus with the students and faculty from Penn's School of Social Policy & Practice (SP2) and Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE).

For PCOM's Digest Magazine, we followed Kara Evans, DO '23, through a full day of her surgery residency at Temple Health–Chestnut Hill Hospital. No posed shots, no "can you do that again but smile." Just her actual day, start to finish.

Another graduation season is in the books, folks. It was MKP’s 19th year documenting graduations. This year we photographed 8,493 grads. You read that right - we got to celebrate with OVER EIGHT THOUSAND GRADS, across eleven schools, and twenty-two graduation ceremonies.

I headed out to Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania a couple times this spring to visit Messiah University for some marketing work. It had been a few years since their last campus shoot, so we had a wide variety of subjects on the shot list. Of course plenty of photos of campus and active classroom shots, as well as time to find all the quiet little nooks Messiah has to offer. The healthy mix of formal and candid shots gave the final gallery a really nice range that the University will be able to use in a mix of marketing spaces for years to come.

A lot goes into preparing for a photoshoot — coordinating schedules, getting the right people in the room, making sure everything reflects your brand. Once the session wraps, the work moves behind the scenes. Here's what that process looks like, and how it's designed to get your images into your hands and ready to use.

Hiring a photographer isn’t just about booking a date and getting a few headshots. The right photographer should help you create images that actually support your brand, strengthen your messaging, and give you content you can use across your website, social, and marketing campaigns.

When your imagery stays frozen in a place in time, it eventually creates a disconnect between what your organization looks like today and what visitors see online.

So the question isn’t whether your website photos should be updated, it’s how often. In a perfect photography utopia we’d all have staff photographers who are on site to constantly tell the story of our work, but we all know the world is far from perfect. So what’s a reasonable minimum?

I got to work with Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) for the first time this year. I'm always blown away by the intelligent and thoughtful people I get to meet in this line of work – SPIA is a perfect example of a community where curiosity, rigor, and genuine commitment to public service come together in a way that’s both inspiring and energizing.

Check out more photos from our session.

This fall, I had the chance to visit Merion Mercy Academy again, and it was such a great day on campus. The goal for this shoot was to refresh their photo library with a mix of classroom candids and lifestyle shots featuring students. We had a solid plan going in, but left plenty of room to move things around and capture moments as they naturally unfolded.