I headed out to Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania a couple times this spring to visit Messiah University for some marketing work. It had been a few years since their last campus shoot, so we had a wide variety of subjects on the shot list. Of course plenty of photos of campus and active classroom shots, as well as time to find all the quiet little nooks Messiah has to offer. The healthy mix of formal and candid shots gave the final gallery a really nice range that the University will be able to use in a mix of marketing spaces for years to come.

For companies that send teams into the field (electricians, technicians, service providers) your brand isn’t just represented online, it’s represented at someone’s front door, in their home.

Before someone invites your team in, most customers have already done a deep dive on your company. They’ve visited your website, stalked your photos, and decided whether your company and your team feels like people they can trust.

There’s nothing wrong with stock photos (she says, side-eyeing the multicultural handshake). They’re bright. They’re polished. They’re easy. And they’re usually ridiculous. They’re also completely forgettable. If you’ve ever scrolled a website and felt a serious sense of déjà vu, congrats — you’ve discovered the “copy + paste but make it branding” era of the internet.

If there’s one word that sums up my time with Ballinger, it’s collaboration. The Ballinger team operates with an impressive sync—designers, architects, and strategists working seamlessly across the many (many) layers of each project. Each turn down a new hallway revealed a different group deep in conversation: brainstorming, sketching, problem-solving, and building ideas together in real time.

Sometimes, photoshoots get treated like a box to check: schedule a shoot, get the images back, update the website, post a few times on social media, and move on. 

Brand photography isn’t meant to be one-and-done, well planned and executed photography is meant to last.

Photos have the ability to shape how people perceive your brand, build a level of trust between your brand and consumers, and in the end, play a part in whether or not someone engages with your content over time.

If it’s been a while since your institution updated the photos on your website, you’re not alone. Time gets away from us when we aren’t paying attention and pretty quickly your ‘new lifestyle photos’ are 3 years old. The faces on your site may have long since graduated, and some other cringe fashion trend from your youth is making a comeback. But don’t stress, one of the easiest (and most impactful) ways to breathe new life into your website and online presence is by updating your branding photos.

Today marketing is all about content, content, content. There is no better way to increase your content bank efficiently than to add photography to your marketing video shoots. Visit PA gets it.

When searching for ways to boost website traffic and enhance website search engine optimization (SEO), businesses often focus on strategies revolving around keywords and content. However, the images on your website also play a crucial role in its search engine performance, which are often overlooked in the flurry of SEO tactics.

The transition from high school to college is a significant milestone in a student's life. This transition can be fraught with challenges, with one of the most prevalent being the "summer melt" phenomenon. Summer melt is the phenomenon where students who intend to enroll in college – who may have even made a deposit or attended a summer orientation – fail to matriculate in the fall, often due to various barriers encountered during the summer months. According to a study from Harvard University, the rates of summer melt range from 10 to 40% of college-intending students, meaning that hundreds of thousands of students are likely melting away over the summer.