At some point in your website design efforts, you will find yourself in need of photographs that represent your key constituents and players: customers, board members, volunteers, etc.

The typical approach for inexperienced photographers is to set up their shots with the subjects in a row — like a criminal lineup, or a picture out of a vintage Chamber of Commerce annual report — and to stand so far away that the background (usually an ugly function room, office, or hallway) dominates.

Trouble is, when you preview the photo on your computer, the smiling faces of the subjects are eclipsed by a jangle of dangling limbs — hands folded in laps, legs akimbo — and their faces look like pinheads. Awkward poses, to say the least.

On a proactive level, consider seating your subjects in comfortable clusters, or friendly poses where heads and shoulders will be dominant and relatively on the same plane, and the hands and feet are out of the shot altogether. (Tell the tall folks to sit down, and the shorter ones to stand up.) On a reactive level, make use of your photo editing cropping tool to chop out the gawky extremities and focus instead on the smiles (we do hope they’re smiling!) of your participants.

P.S. – Make sure there are no incriminating or embarrassing objects in the background. ‘Tis a hard (and costly) thing to Photoshop offensive items out of a picture that absolutely MUST go online.