Company Website Headshots

A very large percentage of our commissions are for company website headshots. These are normally requested if the client is doing a new or refreshing their business website. The ‘About Us’ or ‘Meet the team’ page is as important as any others on their site so it is critical to keep the headshots looking professional and consistent. Even now I am asked to look at a new corporate website and see that the profile photos are taken on a phone and have no consistency at all. This does surprise us as the business owner has spent time and money in other areas of the site but just deemed the profile photos as not important. As we are still in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis it is even harder to maintain a good range of staff headshots on the company website. But we do have a few suggestions to help clients as they are currently unable to commission a corporate headshot photographer.

Our first tip is to make sure that a new employee when taking a new headshot gets a friend to take it and not take their headshot in a mirror. Position themselves in an area of soft light away from direct sunlight and any harsh overhead lighting. Capture the portrait from the waist up so that anyone working on the headshot in post-production has enough room to crop and match the current team photos. Secondly, make sure you are using the highest quality resolution your phone or camera will allow. We receive some amateur portraits that are so pixelated that we can not improve them. Lastly, think about the background. The best solution is to take your headshot against a plain light wall. This allows you to avoid any distracting shapes or colours behind the subject. This is the advice we give to our clients and we then have plenty to work with if they want us to clean and tidy them up in photoshop. We often add backgrounds to make the company website headshots consistent or we add location backgrounds for international clients.