A Real Portrait Studio in Bethel, Maine
The Stonetree Studio
A permanent, controlled portrait studio in Bethel, Maine.
For fifteen years, I’ve shot portraits in boardrooms and basements, wherever the client could give me space and enough light to work with. I got good at making those rooms work, because when you don’t control the room, that’s the job.
That’s the reason the Stonetree Studio exists. It’s a real, permanent room at 2 Mechanic Street in Bethel, Maine, about ninety minutes from Portland if you’re coming from the south, roughly 1,000 square feet, and lit the same way every time you walk in. Middle of July or the middle of a Maine March, the weather outside does whatever it wants. What happens inside that room doesn’t move.
Team consistency
One Portrait Is Easy. A Team, Over Three Years, Is Not.
If you need one good headshot, almost any competent photographer can get you there. The harder problem shows up when a law firm or a real estate office needs ten or twenty headshots that all belong on the same page, shot at different times, sometimes years apart, as people get hired and promoted and leave. Do that on location and you’re gambling that whatever wall is free this year matches the wall from two years ago. Most of the time it doesn’t, and the team page ends up looking like ten different photographers took ten different pictures, because often that’s exactly what happened.
A permanent room removes that variable. The light doesn’t change based on who’s scheduling the shoot or what the weather did that morning. Bring in a new hire eighteen months from now and their portrait sits right next to everyone else’s like it was shot the same week.
Team quotes
How a Team Session Gets Quoted
I don’t run a flat per-person rate for corporate or organizational work. Group size varies, the time needed varies, and sometimes we’re shooting here in the studio and sometimes I’m coming to your office instead. Tell me the specifics, how many people, how much time, which location, and I’ll build a quote around the actual job instead of forcing it into a generic tier that’s either too much or not enough.
Studio tour
You Don’t Have to Take My Word for the Room
Sue Bryce Education and the Portrait System Podcast put together a full video tour of this exact room, plus a sit-down interview about the building and how I run the business here in Bethel. If you want to see the space move before you decide anything, the studio tour walks through the same room on camera.
Pricing
Booking a Session
A headshot session runs $900 plus tax. That’s thirty to sixty minutes in the studio depending on what you need, up to three outfit changes, and a same-day reveal where you walk out with three final retouched images in color and black and white.
A personal branding session is for people who need more than one strong image, a real library they can pull from wherever people find them: a website, a LinkedIn profile, a press page, a conference bio. It starts at $1,800, runs ninety minutes or more, and gets you a minimum of ten final images with full commercial use rights.
Corporate and organizational sessions get quoted the same way I described above, a real number built around the actual job.
I still take my camera into boardrooms and basements when a client needs that, and I don’t mind the work. But when you walk through the door at 2 Mechanic Street, none of that is a variable anymore. The room is already built, the light is already set, and the only thing that changes from one session to the next is you.
In photos
See the Studio
