Well, are they?
I refer to the portraits of key personnel on numerous companies’ websites. Having studied as many as I have over the years, I think one sometimes has to question the word ‘portrait.’
Of course I am generalising here but I feel the observation has to be regarded as a fair, in very much the same way as one can say that there are good drivers on the M25, but they are very hard to spot.
Good drivers aren’t just born. It requires many years of dedication and attention to detail in order to become one (controversial thought). In exactly the same vein, portrait photography (and indeed any other area of the discipline) requires exactly the same attitude.
This leads me to wonder whether the majority of people either don’t realise the damage an indifferent image can do to an otherwise excellent (and expensive) website, or they don’t see them as poor images.
Where does the damage occur? Well, it’s clearly the source of the images. A poor image comes from a poor photographer. That’s the easy bit. The photographer is either inexperienced, or doesn’t care and gets away with doing the minimum, or he’s not a photographer at all. This last option is really quite common in the field of corporate portraiture (image making!) … and this leads me nicely onto what is probably the major reason for this scenario.
Money. Companies very often do their own photography (sorry … ‘take pictures’) themselves to save money in the short term. Of course, professional photographers who are inexperienced or who do the minimum work or indeed know no difference are cheap too.
Maybe the question should be “Are we really saving money?”