Our brand photography

Our photography style is clean, clear and natural to reflect the real life scenarios our membership can relate to. Wherever possible our imagery should show the interaction of people, that could be at a conference, within a clinical environment or just every day life. Please do not use montage or clip-art style imagery.

We’re building an image library as time goes on, and sometime we use stock photographs, however every effort should be made to portray ‘real’ people in positive situations. Imagery should feel natural, not overly staged or cheesey as this makes us look unprofessional. Our photography should reflect the diverse make-up of our membership in terms of ethnicity, age, gender and sector. We don’t want overly posed, or obvious ‘model’ shots with doctors with stethoscopes – that’s not who we are.

You can get hold of free imagery from our library. Or professional image libraries like Pexels, Unsplash and Flickr Creative Commons.

Image use

Where possible use photos at a large size and give them room to breathe. And feel free to use full page, bleed images or double spread imagery if space allows. You’re also welcome to dial up our brand and use photography and our illustration style together.

Legal

Please only ever use images that you’re licenced to use from either our library, a photo stock library, your photographer or a referenced Creative Commons image, otherwise you risk copyright infringement. Never do a ‘Google search’ and just use imagery from the results, as it’s unlikely you’ll be able to just use the image – it’s like referencing a thought or idea in a scientific paper, you wouldn’t just steal these and the same applies to images.

Taking your own photographs

Equipment – what you should use to get the best results

• Please use a digital SLR camera or HDR (high definition) setting on your mobile device to take your photographs.
• The photos need to be good quality to be used – no closed eyes or blurred focus. Don’t use the zoom function as this will cause you to lose picture quality.
• Please don’t use filters like SnapChat or Instagram as these create unauthentic images and lower the picture quality.

Composition – what should you include:

Our brand is all about people – we need to focus on the people within the photos. Make sure your subject is close enough to the camera so you can see their face clearly, and that if you can see the background, it’s not cluttered or messy so the focus is the person. You can use things like portrait modes on your mobile device to knock out the background.