How Will You Know?

Many companies measure what they do so they can determine what works and what doesn’t. So how do you measure the success of the pictures produced by a corporate photographer? How will you know that you hired the right photographer?

Is it as simple as whether or not the pictures are in focus? Is it enough that the photos look nice? Is the price you paid all that matters?

Businesses want results for the money they spend on corporate photography. Just having pretty pictures isn’t enough. They need some way of measuring the effectiveness of the photographs.

You can measure the effectiveness of pictures on social media when viewers “like” or retweet a photo. On some web pages, you might count page impressions or the number of clicks on a call-to-action link.

But how do you measure, for example, the effectiveness of the business portraits on your “About Us” page? How do you know that your photos are sending the right message?

If you had the time, money and expertise, you could have a test group of people take part in a survey or eye-tracking study. You might go much further and use functional MRI or the Facial Action Coding System on your test subjects.

In reality it’s very difficult for most businesses to measure the emotional reaction to the pictures on their web site. Most companies just hope the photographer they hired did the job properly. This is why a photographer’s experience is critical.

Rating Portrait Quality

Yahoo Labs in 2015 published a paper (link to PDF) describing how researchers built predictive models to determine the “beauty” of a photographic portrait. To be clear, this study, based on 10,000 portraits, was not about the beauty of the person photographed but rather the quality of the photograph itself.

The results showed that a good portrait had nothing to do with the subject’s gender, race, age, eye or hair colour or hairstyle. But it had everything to do with the photographer who made the portrait.

The key indicators of a quality portrait were based on (in no particular order):

• overall composition

• face position and orientation

• appearance of facial landmarks (i.e., eyes, mouth, nose)

• overall lighting (i.e., how the light falls across the face)

• contrast between subject and background

• sharpness of the eyes and mouth

• uniqueness of the photo

• type of background or the surroundings

All of these criteria are well known and practised by experienced portrait photographers. These photographers know how to control all of the variables to produce a very good portrait that will suit the intended purpose. Remember that different uses or different messaging may require a different portrait.

Since photography is both an art and a craft, the photographer’s experience is of utmost importance. It should be obvious that a photographer who has produced many portraits will be more successful for your business than a photographer who has done only a few. Or to rephrase that: a less experienced photographer will be learning on the job, your job, at your expense.

The best way to ensure you get high quality corporate photography is to hire an experienced corporate photographer. That may sound obvious but some customers choose only the lowest price which guarantees hiring an inexperienced photographer.