Corporate on the Move: A Business Campaign for Bancolombia

A polished corporate and business-travel campaign for Bancolombia with Getty Images — executives, airports and the quiet confidence of professional life, done without the stock-photo clichés.

Corporate photography has a bad reputation, and mostly it has earned it — the fake handshakes, the frozen smiles, the executives pointing at charts nobody is looking at. This campaign, shot for Bancolombia and licensed through Getty Images, was a chance to prove that business imagery can be as considered and cinematic as any other kind, if you refuse to settle for the cliché.

The setting was the airport: the natural stage of modern professional life, where people are in motion, purposeful, slightly on edge. It is a surprisingly rich place to photograph.

The anti-stock-photo brief

The trap in corporate work is that everyone has seen ten thousand of these images, so the default is invisible. My brief to myself was simple: make it feel like a still from a film about a person's working day, not a clip-art executive. That means real environments, natural light where possible, believable body language, and casting people who actually look like they belong in a suit and an airport.

The same discipline that makes a cinematic character portrait work applies here, just in a brighter key: compose for the person, let the environment tell you who they are, and catch the unguarded half-second rather than the posed one. Confidence, not performance.

Light and glass

Airports are made of glass, which is a gift and a curse. The huge windows flood the terminals with soft, directional daylight — beautiful — but they also throw reflections and blow out backgrounds if you are careless. I shot toward those windows deliberately, using the runway light to separate figures from the concourse and to lend the whole set a clean, optimistic, almost aspirational glow.

Motion is the other key. A businesswoman gliding along a moving walkway, an executive striding through the concourse, a traveller framed against the departures board — these have an energy that a seated boardroom shot never will. Business is movement, so I photographed movement.

“Corporate imagery fails when it forgets there is a real person inside the suit.”

Why this work matters to a photographer's business

Commercial photographers sometimes look down on corporate and stock work. I don't. Banks, airlines, insurers and consultancies are among the largest buyers of imagery in the world, and a Getty-licensed campaign for a client like Bancolombia reaches an enormous audience and keeps working for years. Being able to bring genuine craft to this category — the same eye you'd bring to a beer campaign or a sports shoot — is a serious professional advantage. It is also how an airline ends up trusting you with a whole city, as Delta did for the Medellín destination campaign.

It also demonstrates range, which is what wins the next commission. A brand that sees you can make an airport terminal feel human trusts you with their people, their spaces and their story. Versatility, from the coast of San Andrés to a corporate concourse, is a business asset as much as a creative one.

Quiet confidence

In the end, this campaign is about a mood: the quiet confidence of someone who is good at their job and on their way somewhere. No forced smiles, no charts. Just capable people moving through the world, lit well and seen clearly.

These are some of the frames — the terminals, the travellers, and the clean airport light that made ordinary business life look, for once, like something worth photographing.