Today I received a request from a small company to do a group photo. They wrote that their staff has changed and they needed an updated group photo of their seven employees.
The email said the group must be posed in a single row, everyone evenly spaced apart and no one overlapping the person next to them.
Why do they need this odd setup? The person replied, “We use the picture for head shots of everyone.”
I suggested that headshots cut from a group photo wouldn’t look very good because the lighting, pose, camera angle and background wouldn’t be optimized for each person.
“We always do this,” the person wrote, “because it saves us a lot of money.”
I’m not going to link to the small law firm’s web site but, sure enough, it had a group photo with everyone spaced apart in a row. It looked almost like a police lineup. The web site also had headshots obviously cut from that group photo.
Customers are welcome to crop a photo any way they want but I didn’t want to do an intentionally bad group photo. I declined the job.
Mugshot or Portrait
Business portraits and group photos should show your best side not your thrifty side. Individual business headshots are, well, individualized so that each person looks their best.
Business photography should not be done just to fill empty spaces on your web site. It should be done to communicate a message to your potential customers.
The message of your driver’s licence mugshot is to show what you look like. The message of a business portrait should be about who you are.
Hi Warren:
Good on you for holding your ground. I’m left wondering if that law firm cares so little about the quality of their public image, what does it say about the quality of their work.
Hi Miguel,
Some businesses, both large and small, simply don’t value photography. To them, photos are an afterthought or even a nuisance. How often to you see a business web site that has either no pictures or maybe just a few cheap cliché stock pictures?
Small, older, family-run businesses tend to be traditional and conservative in how they operate, especially law firms.
By contrast, I did photos for a two-person property management company where the two people were in their early thirties. They were very aware of photography, (they hired me twice), and they had lots of pictures on their web site.
Some companies take advantage of photography to market their business and some companies simply don’t understand the value of photography.
Speaking of the value of photography, look at your conclusion: “I’m left wondering if that law firm cares so little about the quality of their public image, what does it say about the quality of their work.”
This is *exactly* the reaction everyone has when looking at a web site with poor quality photos. If they don’t care about their own business, will they care about me, the customer?
This is the very problem that business photography solves. Photography helps create a positive image of a business and helps build a sense of trust to draw customers in.