Putting Your Best Face Forward

So you have decided that you need to update your company’s portraits. Now what? What images are going to show your company in the way you want and what will the images say about you? Not an easy question.

The hardest step has already been taken; you have made the decision. I mentioned in my last post the questions to ask to find the right photographer. Now that you know who you want to capture your company’s face, what type of images?  There are the good old group shots where you have the entire company empty out into the parking lot and stand together, perhaps waving or holding up a banner with the company’s logo or tag line, but that style is a bit dated IMHO.

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Sure you can do the individual head shots with the standard backdrop that is the same for each person. I tend to think that those canned shots start to look like the high school portraits that we all had in our Year Book. Those images make everyone stand on a level ground and they were designed to do just that. No one person was greater or stronger than anyone else. When your competitors go to your website they are going to see a team that is all equal. But what about your leaders? What makes you and your team stand above the rest?

Perhaps your company created and innovative and futuristic change in your industry. Maybe you have one or two people that drove that change and they have had an impact on not only your company, but the industry as a whole. Do they need to blend in with everyone else? Or are they what makes your company stand out among all the rest? Shouldn’t then be shown in a way that says, “Hey, look how special we are! Do business with us!”

So you want to have your most influential people looking like they are just a part of the team? Not likely. You need to make the special people stand out, you want to make their ‘specialness’ stand out. So how can you do that? Environmental images, that’s how.

For just a moment lets imagine a image of Steven Hawking. Do you see images of Dr. Hawking with just a plain background? Probably not. In many cases he is in the foreground of an image and a backdrop is of  a great nebula or a black hole. As soon as you see it you know that this man has something to do with space or the universe. Steve Jobs, how many images show him with the Apple logo in the background, Mark Zuckerberg, almost always has either computers or the Facebook logo behind him. This image is in honor of Father’s Day. It is an image of my father taken a few years before his death. What does it say about him?  Does it make you want to know his story or at least the story of this image?

Environmental portraits are the ones mentioned above, they are the images that stand out and tell you something about the person in the image. This image is an image of a photographer (who could it ever be?). You can see the images on the computer screens behind him and it tells you something about him. Yet at the same time it makes you wonder about him too. You want to know more.  That is what you want images of your people, and of your company to say. They should scream, “We are special. Call us and find out why and how we can help you.”

Although every image, every picture is worth a thousand words, what are the words?  Do they tell the whole story?  Perhaps they just tell most of the story and now the client needs to contact you to learn the whole story and how that story can make them special too.

What story are you telling with your corporate images?

Until next time…