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Ten Tips To Give Your PR Photo The Edge

The picture editors of national newspapers see hundreds of photographs every day and they’re the most exciting, dramatic photos of the moment – images of natural disasters, man-made calamities (an X-ray of a man’s skull with a javelin embedded, for example), CCTV-grabs of crimes in process, celebrity paparazzi shots, major breaking world news, sporting events – and this is what your picture is up against, day in, day out.

Some PR companies seek to compete with these images by cramming their snaps with too much ‘stuff’ – too much colour, too much action, too much visual information.

Others seek not to compete at all – showing scant regard for the wants and needs of picture editors; they simply ‘tick the box’ and whack off a load of spectacularly inappropriate pictures on the basis that they meet the requirements of the client.

Actually the best way of looking at it is to consider the national news media as your other client – and you have to keep them just as happy.

Here are 10 tips you may find useful.

1.    If your piece includes a case study, include pictures.  Make sure the expression is appropriate – for instance, if the person has been ripped off by a bank, they should look unhappy or angry.  They should not be smiling.  Similarly, if they’ve just won a house make sure they don’t look like they’ve just had bad news from home.  Some subjects have to be encouraged to smile.

Include a straightforward head shot, an ‘upright’ of the subject holding any relevant material (£1,000,000 gas bill/lottery ticket), and a ‘landscape’ shot.  This gives lay-out people a welcome choice when it comes to planning their page.

2.    Think about lighting.  If you’re using a basic digital camera to take the pictures, go outside and use natural light if possible. Harsh, direct flash generates hard shadow or ‘bleach out’ faces.  Indoor lights give a colour cast on your pictures.

3.    Understand your file size.  This is a tricky one – too large and they crash everyone’s mail boxes or are rejected by their server, too small and they are not large enough to print.  The ideal solution is to send small pictures as a ‘teaser’ and include a hyperlink to a location where the editor can download a hi res copy.

4.    Watch your background.  This may sound self-evident, but every day picture desks receive countless images which are unusable because of the background – too busy (too much going on, distracting from the subject, or a tree apparently growing out of their head) or irrelevant (if you take a picture of your bank rip-off victim outside a kebab shop, or at the baths, or at a drinks party, you put the journalist in the unwelcome position of having to explain why they are being pictured there, wasting valuable words).  The golden rule is Keep It Simple.

5.    Avoid obvious over-branding, like garish logo t-shirts.  Hopefully your accompanying story/press release will sufficiently tell the tale without the need for overt product placement.  Picture editors have an allergy to logo’d t-shirts.  There are obvious exceptions: if your story is about some amazing new anti-ageing cream which has been independently acclaimed in a Which? Report, you should contain pack shots, and/or a punter applying said miracle gunk.

6.    If your story is about, say, internet habits, don’t go to the bother and expense of shooting and sending a generic shot of someone sitting in an office at a computer – especially if it’s branded.  National newspapers have plenty of stock shots of people in front of computers.

7.    Don’t go ‘arty’.  Avoid using wacky filters.  It’s one thing to use them on a picture of dawn rising over Stonehenge, quite another to apply a fisheye lens to the launch of the latest internet service provider.  Again: Keep It Simple.

8.    Think about who you are sending it to.  Some picture will be fine for both tabloids and broadsheets, others will require different sittings, different poses, different ‘moods’ for the different papers.

9.    If your story has gone down well with the newsdesks, or with your news contacts, it’s a good idea to put in a quick courtesy call to the picture desks to let them know that news are interested in it (don’t oversell it – précis the tale in a couple of sentences) and that you have pictures if they need them.

10.    Read the papers!  It sounds dreadfully clichéd but the best way of understanding what exactly a newspaper wants is to look through them every day – which PR stories have landed well? Which ones have used photos? How have the photos been cropped?  Are different shots used in different publications?  Every day offers a free masterclass in what is required.

Written by Jay Williams