you’re on a company website and there’s a section called either ‘about us’, ‘meet the team’ or something similar. you click on it and 9 times out of 10 you’ll see a photo like this one…
nicely done, professional, very straightforward, probably accompanied by a brief career history of each person. it serves it’s purpose. that’s how a ‘meet the team’ photo should be.
every now and then the company may have hired a photographer with a thing for creative angles, as shown in the photo below..
for those not in the know, this is called the ‘elevated team shot’ and whilst there’s nothing too shit about this type of photo, if you want your company to retain any kind of dignity then the angle of attack should never exceed the level shown. if the photographer is directly above you on a crane, your neck is at a right angle and you can only see your head, shoulders and feet in the photograph, it’s gone too far. the photo below is nearly at that point. i imagine he did try more extreme elevation but someone stopped him…
you see? they don’t look comfortable, their bodies look tiny and when i ‘met the team’ i instantly lost about half my respect for them as a company.
sometimes each employee will be photographed individually, as below…
again, this is how it should be done. he looks professional and presentable, he isn’t wearing a woolly jumper and he’s smiling at an acceptable level. obviously you don’t want a face like thunder in an ‘mtt’ photo but you also don’t want to be smiling manically - people don’t trust that look in a staged photograph. example…
that would possibly frighten me if i was looking to do business with her department. she looks as if she’s itching to lose control at any point and if i was her superior i’d tell her to take some time off before she suffers some kind of meltdown.
with individual ‘mtt’ photos the photographer can ruin your credibility in other ways too, the most common involving objects. for some reason a large number of photographers attempt to think outside the box when taking mtt photos only to land back in that same box with a thud. they think that involving objects, comical or not, in an mtt photo is an adventurous way of showing an employee’s lighter side, a way to really let the viewer in and learn a bit more about the things that make the subject tick.
what they don’t ever consider is that it makes the employee look really fucking stupid.
there are quite a few examples of this kind of abuse (it is abuse) and they’re all incredibly funny for everyone but the victims in the photos. take a look…
there are two more to show you: one which actually scares me a little and confuses the hell out of me (the one that doesn’t involve food) whilst the other one is my favourite ever mtt photo (the banana phone). remember, these are all genuine companies (click on the photos) who actually want custom…
why the hell is he tied up? is he saying he feels constrained at work? he’s suffocated? no room to blossom? unbelievable. as for the banana shot, it’s as much down to the facial expression and hand behind back as it is the actual banana-phone gag that makes this the best mtt photo ever.
the moral of the story? if you’re posing for an mtt photo, make sure you aren’t…
- looking up more than 40 degrees
- frowning or grinning wildly
- interacting with an object that isn’t a chair
i’m honestly thinking of devoting a section of the site to this phenomenon - there are so many companies out there and a huge number of ‘crazy’ photographers, the amount of hilarious ‘meet the team’ sections on corporate websites is surely immense.
if you find any let me know.
