Photography

Our Approach

The Northern Arizona University visual experience is inspired by the spirit of the university’s students and faculty. Our photography emphasizes the strengths, adventure, and charm of life as a Lumberjack.

We look for these three qualities in our photography:

1. Authentic

We depict our subjects engaged in real activities, not artificially staged scenes. We do not idealize the university experience. Rather, we show the wide range of activities, achievements, and emotions that are part of a university education.

Authentic photography reveals the emotion connected to a person, an event, or a setting. Avoid subjects looking into the camera whenever appropriate.

2. Local

We take advantage of our combination of nature, heritage, and modernity to capture images that could only originate in our environment.

Local photography captures familiar places, sometimes in an unfamiliar way.

3. Varied

From extreme close-ups to panoramas, we use multiple perspectives to strengthen the appeal of our communications.

Varied photography considers subjects from all angles to engage and delight viewers.

The university has photography resources for your use. University Marketing maintains an online gallery with photos of academics, student life, buildings, research, and more available for you to download and use in your marketing materials. All photos used in NAU marketing materials university-wide MUST be sourced from this gallery.

Guidelines and Tips

The success of our communications depends on excellent images, used well. We keep these three guidelines in mind when shooting, selecting, and designing with photos.

1. Show people: We have a busy, vibrant campus; our photos need to reflect that. Campus photos should show people and activity. Don’t use photos with empty spaces and sidewalks.

2. Focus on the ‘what’: Always select and use the photos that can visually communicate what the subjects are doing or looking at to present a complete visual message.

3. Take advantage of “white space”: Photos that naturally provide “white space” for incorporating any text content are ideal for presenting a more professional look of the NAU brand.

Context counts: When setting up a photo shoot, consider incorporating visuals in the background that can provide more context for the photos.

Website photography guidelines

1. Ensure images follow a horizontal (landscape) format where possible.
2. Avoid placing strong subjects on the extreme left or right edges of the image, as this can be an issue with automatic cropping when the image is responsively resized.
3. Center the subject in the frame when possible.
4. With looser images, plan dead space at the bottom of the image to accommodate text and titles.
5. Consider capturing wide images with symmetry, but ensure essential elements are not on the extreme left or right of the image.
6. Size images to at least 2400 pixels on the horizontal side.