Making Awards and Press Coverage Photograph Well

Why glass and acrylic awards are hard

A polished glass award is essentially a mirror wrapped around a lens. It reflects whatever is in front of it, including you, your phone, the window and the ceiling light, and it refracts whatever is behind it into a distorted mess. Engraving only becomes legible when something bright sits behind or beside it at the right angle, which is why the text often vanishes in a straight-on shot.

The fix is to control what the award can see. Shoot it against a large plain surface — a wall, a sheet of card, a closed door — and put yourself outside the reflection zone by shooting slightly off to one side rather than square on. Keep the phone low and close to the surface the award sits on so the ceiling is not in its field of view.

To make engraving readable, place a bright surface behind the award and slightly to one side. A window with a sheer curtain, a laptop screen showing a white document, or a piece of white card catching daylight all work. Move it in small increments and watch the engraving in the viewfinder rather than looking at the object itself.

• Shoot against one large plain surface, not an office scene
• Move yourself out of the reflection rather than trying to remove it later
• Put a bright surface behind and beside the award to light the engraving
• Wipe fingerprints before shooting, since they are far more visible than they look
• Shoot from just above the award's own height, not from standing height

The presentation photo you get on the night

The ceremony photo is a different problem. Stage lighting at awards dinners is usually a hard spotlight from above, against a dark backdrop, with a screen behind that is either blindingly bright or off. Faces get top-lit into shadow, the room behind goes black, and the official photographer's shot may not reach you for weeks.

If you can, take your own frames as a backup from a few rows forward and to one side rather than dead centre from the back. Getting closer matters more than anything else, because phone digital zoom in low light produces noise rather than detail. If the venue photographer offers a posed shot afterwards, ask them to do it away from the stage, against a plain section of wall in normal room lighting.

Whatever you end up with will need work: lifting the shadowed side of faces, correcting the colour cast that stage lighting throws, and evening out the contrast between a bright backdrop and dark suits. Foxi AI handles this from the uploaded frame, and the constraint is that it is fixing the photograph — a frame where the faces are genuinely unrecognisable in shadow has no detail to recover.

Badges, tiers and logos used correctly

Most rankings and awards come with a logo or tier badge and a set of usage terms: which year it may be shown for, whether it can be modified, whether it may sit next to other marks, and sometimes where on a site it may appear. Read the terms rather than assuming, and keep a copy, because the person who has to answer a query about it in two years will not be you.

A badge is not a photograph and should not be used as one. It belongs alongside real imagery — a caption strip under a photo, a small mark in the corner of a page, a line in a signature block — rather than blown up as a hero image. A page of badges with no photographs reads as a firm that has nothing else to show.

Be precise in the wording next to the badge about what was actually won and by whom. A ranking of one practice group is not a ranking of the firm, and a shortlisting is not a win. Overstating this is the kind of thing competitors notice and, in some jurisdictions, professional advertising rules cover. If you are unsure whether a claim is permissible in your jurisdiction, check with your regulator or your own compliance adviser rather than relying on what other firms appear to be doing.

Building a press kit people can actually use

Trade publications work to deadlines and will run whatever is easiest to obtain. A press kit that saves an editor ten minutes gets used; one that requires an email exchange often does not. Put it at a stable URL and keep it current.

Include the firm logo in a couple of formats, two or three exterior or office photos, current portraits of the people most likely to be quoted, and a short boilerplate paragraph about the firm. Provide each photo at full resolution rather than the web-sized version, and include a plain text file with credit lines and permitted usage.

Name the files as a stranger would want them named. A file called firm-name-managing-partner-2026.jpg survives an editor's downloads folder; IMG_4471.jpg does not.

• Logo files, including one that works on a dark background
• Two or three exterior and interior photographs at full resolution
• Current portraits of your likely spokespeople
• Boilerplate firm description and press contact
• A note on credits and permitted usage

One photo, several destinations

The same award image typically has to work as a press release attachment, a website banner, a news post thumbnail and a social card, and those are different shapes. Shoot wider than any single crop needs so there is room to cut a tall frame, a square and a wide banner from the same original.

Keep the important content — the award, the engraving, the faces — away from the extreme edges, since every crop eats the edges first. If a banner crop cuts the top of someone's head off, the problem was framing at capture, not cropping afterwards.

Platforms change their recommended dimensions and compression behaviour regularly, so check the current documentation for wherever you are posting rather than working from a size list someone saved two years ago.

What the announcement photo is really doing

It is worth being clear-eyed about this. Nobody can promise that a well-photographed award post brings in work, and any agency that tells you otherwise is guessing. What a decent image does is make the announcement look like it came from an organised firm rather than being thrown together, and it gives you an asset that is still usable when the same award comes round next year.

The more durable value is often in the by-products: the portrait you had taken for the press kit, the clean exterior shot, the properly lit photo of the practice group. Those get used constantly, long after the award cycle has moved on.

So treat the award as a reason to do a small amount of photography properly, rather than as a photograph in itself. The trophy on the shelf is much less interesting than the people who won it.

Frequently asked