If you’re working with a photographer to capture images for your website, clear and effective communication is key.
In this post, we’ll walk you through how to brief a photographer to ensure you get great shots that will work on the website.
1. Understand the Purpose of the Photos
Before you start planning the shoot, it’s crucial to understand the role the photos will play on your website. Are they meant for your homepage, product pages, or blog posts? Knowing the purpose will help guide the style, content, and composition of the images. Discuss the following with your photographer:
- Goals: What message do you want to convey? Is it professionalism, creativity, warmth, or something else?
- Usage: Where will the images be placed? This will influence how they should be framed and styled. Let them know what main pages you will be having so they have that in mind.
2. Emphasize the Need for Landscape Orientation
Landscape (horizontal) images are often preferred for websites due to their ability to fit wider content areas and create a visually engaging experience. Here’s why this format is crucial:
- Wider Layouts: If you think about the dimensions of a computer screens, they are a rectangle shape. Landscape images complement the wide layout of many website sections, making them ideal for banners, headers, and wide content blocks.
- Composition Flexibility: They provide more space for interesting compositions, allowing for better incorporation of text or design elements. They allow us to crop the top and bottom of an image to show more detail in a narrower space.
Clearly communicate to your photographer that the majority of the photos should be in landscape format, as this is important for your website’s design. Also make sure that there are a variety of images that are wide shots, as this also allows for better cropping.
For example, here are two photos that have been supplied for a website photoshoot, featuring a single subject in an office setting. The left one is a vertical image that is quite close in to the subject. The right one is a landscape image, where the subject of the image is further away (so there is more negative space in the image that can be cropped out without losing impact.)
If we were to use these on a website homepage, you can see the difference when the space is narrow.
As we need to make the photograph fill the width of the screen, the first image (shot in portrait format) becomes very zoomed in, and does not provide a pleasing or impactful layout:
If we were to use this image, we would need to edit it to create negative space to the left.
Whereas the second image (shot in landscape format) does not lose any impact when the top and bottom of the photograph are cropped:
The shaded area below shows that part of the image that is cropped for the website design.
Hopefully you can see in the example above how the wide, landscape composition of the photograph provides the greatest flexibility. Remember – we can always crop into a subject, but it is a lot more work to generate parts of an image that do not exist.
4. Provide Composition Guidelines
Effective composition is key to great website photos. Here’s how to guide your photographer:
- Framing: Specify how subjects should be framed within the landscape format. For example, if you want a wide shot of a team meeting, make sure the composition leaves room for the context around the subjects.
- Negative Space: If your website design incorporates text over images (like the example above), make sure there’s adequate negative space where text can be placed without obscuring important elements. This is a very common design choice in websites, so it is always great to have photographs that consider this – it reduces our editing time – as otherwise we often need to add more onto the image via the use of photography editing tools.
- Give examples: If applicable, provide examples of images from your website or other websites that align with your vision. It could be showing them an example website that you have shown your web designer so that everyone is on the same page.
3. Detail the Content and Style
If you are able to provide clear guidance on the content and style of the photos, it will help the photographer capture exactly what you need. Consider the following:
- Subjects: What should be featured in the images? This might include products, team members, or the workspace.
- Style: Define the visual style you’re aiming for, whether it’s formal, casual, modern, or vintage.
- Tone: Discuss the mood you want to convey—bright and cheerful, warm and inviting, or sleek and professional.