Foundations · 09

Photography

Photography is the one place in the branding with real warmth. It shows people and nothing else — no server rooms, no stock shots of machinery, no handshakes.

Two treatments

Every frame exists in a colour and a black-and-white version. Both come out of the shoot — neither is a CSS filter applied afterwards.

Studio portrait, colour treatment — Colour — team grid on Über uns

Studio portrait, black and white treatment — B/W — avatars, lists, quotes

Which one when. Colour when the picture is the content — the team grid on the Über uns page. Black and white when the picture only identifies someone — avatars in the team strip, author images in the blog. Mixing both on one page: no.

Style

Aspect	Requirement
Background	warm grey studio gradient, no rooms, no props
Clothing	Control-F shirt or quiet solid colours; no patterns
Expression	straight into the lens, a real smile; no folded arms
Light	soft from front-side, one key light, visible modelling
Resolution	originals 1280 × 1600 (4:5), delivered as WebP in three widths

Crops

Use	Ratio	Note
Team grid (Über uns)	4 : 5	head in the upper third, shoulders cropped
Avatar (team strip, blog)	1 : 1, round	tight head crop, b/w
Group shot	16 : 9	full width, only as a section closer
Casual / at work	3 : 2	careers page, never on the landing page

Photos get no rounded corners (except round avatars), no frame and no shadow. When an image needs to be bounded, the 1 px contour of the surrounding cell does it.

Source files

All frames live under control_f_website_new_design/04-photography/, sorted by category and treatment:

portraits/color/ and portraits/bw/ — studio portraits
casual/ — working situations
group/ — group and founder shots

Filenames are paired: portrait-9.jpg exists in both folders and means the same frame.

The numbering stays in the archive. In the delivery folder a studio portrait is filed under the person in it — assets/img/team/simon.jpg, not portrait-04.jpg — because the pages that show a face name the person beside it, and a re-shoot then replaces one file instead of renumbering the set.