Photo from evsimon.com · Book your event
A company website needs photographs that explain what the company does, who is behind it, how it works and why it deserves trust before anyone gets in touch. There is a common base to almost all of them: portraits of the people on the team, a group photo, images of the directors when they have a visible role, photos of the premises and the working environment, and scenes of the service in action, with its processes and the details of the craft. The home page usually also calls for a main image that sums up the business well. Each sector shapes that list in its own way, because a training centre, a workshop and a professional practice sell in different ways. The starting point, however, is the same: every photo has to fit a specific section of the website. Stray images, however good they are, end up with no clear place to go.
What corporate photography is
This kind of image is known as corporate or business photography. These are photos made for a specific company, with its people, its spaces and its way of working, rather than images bought from a stock photo library that could serve any other business. They can show people, spaces, processes, services, details of the work and real everyday situations. When they are well thought out, the website feels less generic and more closely tied to what the company really is.
Which photo each section of the website needs
To understand this, you only need to think about how a website is organised. The home page aims to make a clear first impression, so it usually relies on the team, the premises, the working context or an image that represents the business well. The page that explains who the company is can use photos of spaces, people, history or the working environment, so that the text does not have to explain everything on its own. Service pages need to show the work as it is being done. Photos also make the text accompanying each section easier to digest.
Photo from evsimon.com · Book your event
Portraits, directors and the group photo
Individual portraits also have a life beyond the website: employees use them on LinkedIn, in marketing materials and in presentations. Directors usually need a more varied shoot, because their photos end up in the media, press kits and interviews. The group photo gives an idea of the size of the company and the diversity of the people who make it up.
What happens when these photos are missing
If these images are missing, the website can look fine and still leave unexplained what the company offers and why anyone should trust it. Stock photos make the problem worse when what the company wants to convey is the approachability and authenticity of its team. Often the root cause is not defining the approach properly from the start, or choosing the wrong person to take the photos. A mobile phone in the hands of someone with a good eye is rarely enough, and for a commission like this it is worth hiring a photographer with experience of working with businesses.
Photo from evsimon.com · Book your event
How to prepare the shoot
The first step is to review the photographs the company already has and check whether they still represent it well. Next, it is worth going through the website section by section and noting what each one should show: people, spaces, processes or services. That way you know which images to produce before organising the shoot. If an agency is handling the project, the photographs should be planned while the design still has time to adapt to them. With that list ready, the conversation with the photographer starts from how the company sells, what it needs to explain and what kind of trust it has to build.
