Portrait shots for business use are a necessary evil. Whether you are a one man/woman band or a huge corporation, having photographs of staff on your website, promotional literature and on display in a reception area is very important. Putting a face to your business humanises it, which customers tend to like.
I often cringe at how bad some business shots are: out of date (sometimes twenty years out of date!!!!), badly taken, resolution too low (pixelated images) and just plain boring. Business shots have to look professional, but they should also reflect the personality of the individual even if it’s in a very subtle way.
This is a photo of Roger Stotesbury who’s director of a company called Jump Off The Web that provides short videos for web marketing, so as he does a creative job his photos had to be different from the norm. The orange wall in the background is really eye catching and I’ve purposefully left space above his head so that the composition is unusual and more like a portrait you’d see accompanying a magazine article than a standard head shot. It’s an image that would stand out amongst more conventional business portraits and lets face it, who’s want to be like everyone else?