Planning an Effective Brand Photography Session for Your Website

Above: Example of the kind of spacious horizontal portrait photo compositions that are most useful for website design.

Advice for photographers (and people who hire them) from professional web designers

Special considerations for your website photography are not rocket science, but we’ve prepared a few helpful recommendations to keep in mind before your shoot.

For best results, please tell your photographer:

• Prioritize landscape orientation. A couple options of vertical shots are good for bio pages and in-line images, but horizontal images afford the most dynamic options for use in a design environment that changes size for different windows and devices.

• Take plenty of shots that have the subject off to one side, or with plenty of background (aka “negative space”) to work with. Don’t be precious about composition because artful cropping will be lost in mobile scaling most of the time. Instead, try to make sure the photos still pass muster even if they're tightened down to 1/3 of the original width.

• Related to above: leave room for text copy and other content to float over some of the images without smooshing the subject's face.

• Play with depth of field and provide a mixture of in-focus and out-of-focus backgrounds. Again, sometimes backing off from the subject wayyyy more than you usually would is a great plan.

In general, please consider that 50% or more of your website’s visitors will be using mobile devices, and that your website is not your photographer’s personal portfolio. These images need to perform work, and they have particular specs.

Please read our article about image optimization for more information about post-processing!

– The LightPress Team