Do you need professional photographs?

Short answer: if you are a solo practitioner, you need one photograph of yourself, and almost certainly nothing else. If you are a practice rather than a person the answer is less obvious, and there is a case further down for having none at all.

The one that matters

A person deciding whether to contact a therapist is doing something slightly frightening. A photograph of the actual human being lowers that by more than any sentence on the page.

It needs to be:

• Recent. Recognisably you, now.
• Well lit. A window on an overcast day is better than most indoor lighting and better than direct sun.
• Looking at the camera. Not gazing thoughtfully into the middle distance.
• Reasonably plain. A background that is not busy. Clothes you would actually wear to work.

That is the whole specification. A friend with a recent phone and twenty minutes will produce something usable. A professional will produce something better, and if you can afford it and it makes you less self-conscious about having your photograph taken, it is money well spent — but it is not the difference between a website that works and one that does not.

What a photographer is genuinely worth paying for

If you are a practice rather than a person. Several practitioners, photographed consistently, is a job. Mixed phone photographs of six people in six different lights look worse than no photographs at all.

If your room is part of the offer. A dedicated space you want people to see before they arrive — particularly for work with children, families or anyone for whom the environment matters — is worth photographing properly.

If you have a specific reason to look a particular way. Working with organisations, doing supervision or training, presenting at conferences: those audiences read photography differently from a person looking for counselling.

If having your photograph taken is difficult for you. This is the underrated one. A good photographer’s actual skill is making somebody comfortable enough to look like themselves. If you have been avoiding the whole subject for two years, that is what you are paying to solve.

What you almost certainly do not need

Stock photography. The category has a fixed vocabulary — hands around a mug, pebbles balanced on a beach, a path through a misty wood, an empty armchair, somebody looking out of a rain-streaked window — and a prospective client has seen all of it on four other websites this evening. It does not read as calm. It reads as unspecific.

If a page needs something in that space, better options are: nothing at all, a photograph of the actual room, or a considered piece of colour and shape that belongs to the design rather than pretending to be a photograph of a feeling.

When the answer is no photographs at all

There is one situation where the rule genuinely reverses. A practice that works with children, young people or families cannot photograph its clients, and photographing a model instead means staging the thing the practice exists to be careful about. A photograph of a child is also always a photograph of a particular age, and most of the people reading are not that age.

One of the concepts in the collection, the Harbour therapy centre, is drawn throughout for exactly that reason — rooms shown accurately with nobody in them, and people drawn without faces. It is not a stylistic preference. It is what was left once photography had been ruled out honestly.

If that is your situation, the answer is not stock photography with a disclaimer. It is deciding what the images are for and finding a form that can do it.

A note on the room

If you photograph your consulting room, photograph it as it is, with the light it actually has. A room that has obviously been staged is worse than no room, because the first thing it tells somebody is that they are being sold to.

Do not photograph anything that could identify a client, and do not use photographs of people who are not you unless they have agreed to it in writing and know where it will appear.

The honest summary

One good photograph of you. The room, if the room matters. Nothing else, unless there is a specific reason.

Most therapy websites would be improved more by deleting three stock images than by adding a photoshoot.