There is a measurement problem within the setting of school website photography. The schools track the number of enquiries they receive, the number of people who book to attend an open day, and the conversion rate of those who are admitted to the school. However, the school does not track the decision that is made by the prospective parent before these measurements – the decision that is made based upon the photographs on the school’s website.
The judgment of humans happens in a matter of milliseconds. And in a way, photography is where that judgment lives. For Websites for schools, consider https://www.fsedesign.co.uk/websites-for-schools/
The human brain processes images at a rate of approximately sixty thousand times faster than it processes text. Before a prospective parent even reads the first sentence of the website of the school in which you work, they have already formed an emotional response to the images that you have included on the site. These images show children who appear to be happy or those who appear to be posed for a photograph. The images of the classrooms within the school show the children as alive and engaged in their educational environment, or those that appear to be staged for a photograph. The adults within the images appear to be enjoying their time working with the children, or those who appear to be props within a photograph of the children.
The photography that produces the wrong feeling is doing active damage to admissions that never appears in any report because the families who leave never register their presence.
What does the wrong photograph look like?
It looks like children who are arranged in rows, smiling at a camera, doing something that no child would voluntarily do. It looks like group shots where every face appears glazed in the way that people appear to be after being asked to hold a position for longer than feels natural. It looks like classrooms that have been tidied to the point of sterility before the photographer arrives to take the shot.
What does the right photograph look like?
It appears as though these children have forgotten that they are even being photographed. They are all focused on something that genuinely interests them.
It looks like adults whose body language communicates that they actually like children. This is an attitude that is needed in a school setting; it tells the student that this is an adult who has chosen to become a teacher. It tells the student that this is an adult who is there for their benefit.
Diversity, as depicted in the photographs, reflects the diversity of the students that attend the school. And it looks recent. Schools change. Leadership changes. The children change every year. Photography that was excellent when it was taken becomes misleading when it’s left on a website for years after the moment it was captured has passed.
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