The images you use in your materials are more than just decoration. The right image can enhance your message in so many ways. It can attract attention to your materials; it can elicit powerful emotions that urge action; it can establish a relationship with the landowner, signaling that you really understand them; and it can also convey part of your message content so you don’t have to use as many words.

But what is the right image?

We get asked this question a lot at our workshops.  In part, the answer to this question lies in best practices. As a general rule, close-ups work better than landscape level shots; faces (human or animal) tend to draw attention; and people are more likely to attend to images of people who are like them or show landscapes that are familiar.

But there are exceptions to all these rules, causing me to think long and hard about how to offer good guidance on this topic. The key is that the image must speak to the audience.  Oftentimes, this means that the image communicates a story. When a member of your audience sees this image, they should immediately know what is going on, who the characters are, what they’re saying, and what they’re feeling.

Consider the two pictures below.

This is a picture of a bunch of people walking through the woods. Can you tell who they are and what they’re feeling? I could not.

Now consider this picture.  It’s clearly a picture of a young family out in the woods. This picture also tells you how the people involved are feeling. The children look excited and engaged, and the parents look relaxed and happy. This picture would remind woodland retreat owners why they own their woods and the kind of lifestyle they want.

Pictures that mean something to your audience and evoke emotions are better choices than those that don’t. But remember that this can be a subjective thing—what speaks to you may not speak to your landowners. The best tack may be to choose pictures that seem to carry a story and an emotion, and then do some quick tests to see whether they also speak to your landowners.

By the way, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use images without people or animals. Those images speak to your audience differently—by evoking powerful emotions like pride, awe, fear or terror. But that’s a topic for a different post.