Photos for your Website

We were recently approached to take some staff photographs for an SEO company, Retriever Web Solutions. Up until now they have been using photographs taken on their mobile phones for their profiles on social media sites and website.

As with all companies you have to ask yourself the image that this gives. When you meet someone you subconsciously judge them within 15-20 seconds, the same happens when you first see someones profile picture on any social media site or when you look at a website. First impressions really do count and when you are trying to get new business online it becomes vitally important that you make the right first impression.

We are not all perfect and we don’t necessarily get it right first time but it is realising the little things that you can do to improve the look of yourself online that is important.

This is where professional photography comes in.

Stuart has very kindly given me permission to show the photograph that he was using :

I think this is actually quite typical of the photographs that lots of people use. Unfortunately if you met Stuart you may not recognise him from this photo !

We went in to Stuarts offices to photograph his staff after first meeting with him to discuss exactly what he was looking for. Each company is different and people want different style images to fit the rest of their website and style. Stuart wanted head and shoulders photographs of each member of staff against a plain white background; this is quite different from other commercial portraits that we have produced. When you are thinking about photos for your website it is important that you take some time to think about the look and feel that you want to achieve and discuss this with the photographer first 🙂

We used our portable Elinchrom Quadra lights. One of these was used to light the background; we used a light coloured wall as the background. We then used a second light with a softbox to light the people. This is our lighting setup:

I also photograph a colour card so that when I get back to the office I can create a custom colour profile to make sure that I’m reproducing the colours accurately… Yes, it is a bit more work at the time but it does mean that by doing this, working in manual mode and using decent lighting I have a very consistent set of photographs at the end of the editing process 🙂

Anyway, these are the staff photographs for Retriever Web Solutions.