5 tips for improving your corporate photos

Photographs in employee publications and intranets are too often dull and cliché-ridden—laughably bad in some cases. But once we’re done chuckling at those lousy images, let’s deal with two important questions:

Longtime photo instructor Phil Douglis is the man to field these questions. Douglis, a former corporate communications manager, has spent four decades teaching corporate photography—and helping communicators understand the language of pictures. He also keeps a photo blog on MyRagan.com.

“If you want someone to read a free publication then approximately 80 percent of the content needs to be visual—that means pictures, headlines, captions and the white space surrounding—20 percent text,” Douglis told Ragan.com.

Problem is, most people are visually illiterate, Douglis said. “That might be a strong term, but I see visual literacy as a way of expressing a language visually and most communicators don’t understand the language of pictures,” he explained. “They need to study it.”

So let’s study it. Here are his overarching principles of corporate photography, five practical tips, advice on how to get management on board and poses to avoid.

The big picture