Rajen Mistry
Your visual content has been nearly there for longer than you'd like
For the marketing, people and comms leads at Cambridge companies growing faster than their content can keep up.
The team shots are from last year. The event photos captured the room but not what made it worth being in. If that sounds familiar, this page is worth five minutes.
Creative direction & content
Brand & culture photography
Leadership & team portraits
Events captured
Light video including interviews
Visual storytelling from the inside
Nobody owns visual content. So it gets solved job by job, and job by job never adds up.
Different photographers, different briefs. Nothing holds together.
Re-briefing from scratch every time. Your context and brand explained again.
Technically fine, doesn't feel like you. The images pass. They don't persuade.
The moments pass unrecorded. The new lab, the first week of a big hire, the day something worked. Booking a shoot for them was never worth the effort.
The brand looks stronger in the deck than it does online.
It isn't a budget problem. It's an ownership problem.
Rajen Mistry — twenty-two years in creative agencies, most of it as a creative director. Accenture, Johnson & Johnson, Center Parcs. I wrote the briefs before delivering the work.
The recruitment page shows real people in the real building, and candidates can tell.
The deck, the site, the careers page and the social feed look like one company, because they were made by one eye.
When something happens — a raise, a hire, a launch, a visit — it gets recorded, because someone is already booked to be there.
Nobody on your team is hunting for a photographer, writing a brief, or apologising for the images in a review.
And the company people see online is finally the company you actually work in.
That's the outcome. Here's how it's produced.
A year from now
Leadership portraits, refreshed as the team changes
Company life - what a candidate wants to see
The work, mid-shift — candid, unposed, endlessly usable
Most photography is booked as an event. Something big happens, someone gets hired, briefed and sent away. It works for the big thing and does nothing for the eleven months around it.
A day a month, inside your brand.
I shoot whatever is genuinely live — the team at work, the space, new faces, a portrait that needs refreshing, the thing that just launched. This includes short videos and interviews. Not a production. A conversation, lit properly, cut short.
Over a year that becomes a library rather than a folder. Current, consistent, and already yours when the job ad goes live and when people are looking.
Not a shoot. A rhythm.
How it runs
Ahead of each month — a short note asking what's happening. You don't write a brief. We agree a date to pop in. I’m central Cambridge, I’m flexible.
On the day — I shoot what's live. If nothing obvious is on, we use the time for portraits, spaces and working shots.
Within a week — images organised and ready. Video cut short for social.
Every quarter — we step back. What's working, what's missing, what's coming.
A year of Lightcast content in use
Lightcast - Case study
They had to hire fifty people without saying what they did
Lightcast is a Cambridge biotech company. When I started, there were about twenty-five of them. They'd just closed a large funding round, they were in stealth, and they needed to recruit fifty people that year — without being able to talk about the product.
I was brought in by the Head of People, not marketing. Which tells you what the problem actually was.
If you can't sell the technology, you sell the place. The work became the culture: the people, the building, the benefits, what a week there actually felt like. Everything a candidate needed to decide, made visible, with the one thing everyone wanted to talk about left out of frame.
That ran for about two years. Consistent, monthly, cumulative. Not a campaign — a supply of material that recruitment, the site and social could all draw on.
Then a Director of Marketing arrived and the brief widened. With more that could be said about the technology, the work balanced culture with broader brand content. Formal headshots. Internal events, summer and winter. Trade events in Liverpool and London. Guest speakers, board visits, and the candid material that feeds social week to week.
Four years in, through a brand refresh. When Lightcast rebuilt their brand for a 2025 launch, I was already inside it — advising on the visual direction rather than being briefed on it, with years of consistent material already in the bank.
From twenty-five people to over a hundred. The same eye, the whole way.
Four years on, the monthly rhythm ended. The relationship didn't — I still shoot for Lightcast when there's something that needs shooting. Which is the honest version of what a partnership like this becomes: four years of material that holds together, and someone who already knows the brand when the next thing comes up.
Content gallery
Use the arrows to scroll through
Interviews
Insights
Team events
Industry events
I’ve been working with Rajen for over three years, since joining Lightcast as Director of Marketing. His relationship with Lightcast pre-dated my arrival, and he played a critical role in establishing our initial brand and associated assets. Since then, he has acted as a trusted advisor as we planned and executed a major brand refresh, rolled out at the start of 2025.
Biotech marketing is often impersonal, but Rajen has a strong belief in putting people at the forefront, using their stories to tell the Lightcast story through his photography. Alongside the formal headshots used on our website and promotional materials, Rajen captures key moments from across the company: summer and winter internal events, guest speakers, board visits, and the candid shots we rely on for social media.
On a more personal note, Rajen has also provided informal mentoring as I've navigated the challenges of leading marketing at a start-up.
— Scott Brouilette, Director of Marketing, LightcastAlongside Lightcast, I work with Journey (Property Developer), Babouris Property Real Estate, and Jalal Stays — office lifestyle, property & interiors, hospitality. And of course, various founders and entrepreneurs on their personal brand.
"We already have a photographer we like."
Then keep them. This solves continuity, not quality.
"We don't have enough happening to fill a day a month."
Everyone says this. Once someone's booked to look, there's always more — and quiet months are when the portraits and spaces get done properly.
"Can we start smaller?"
Yes. Most relationships start with one day.
"What happens if our marketing lead changes?"
The Lightcast relationship survived exactly that. Being inside the brand beats being inside one person's head.
The questions people ask first
Who this is for
Companies of roughly 25 to 250 people, with a small marketing or people team, growing faster than the content can keep up.
Probably not the right fit for a one-off product shoot, for companies already happy with an agency, or for anyone who wants a photographer to turn up and shoot the brief without asking questions. I ask questions. That's most of the value.
Ways to work together
I'm Rajen. I spent over twenty years in creative agencies, most of it as a creative director, for brands including Accenture, Johnson & Johnson, Center Parcs, and Facebook. I know what you're up against.
That's why this works as a relationship rather than a booking.
If the visual content has been nearly there for a while, let's have a conversation about what a year of it looking right would take.
Thirty minutes, no pitch. I'll tell you honestly whether a rhythm makes sense for where you are.
Email me: contact@rajenmistry.com
Call me: +44 (0) 79715644300
Or book a call or I’m happy to have a coffee in Cambridge.
Rajen Mistry
Photography & Creative Direction. Cambridge, UK.
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