Both, and you are probably shorter on photos than you think.
Most companies we walk into have a folder of pictures from 2017. The building has been added onto since, four of the people in them do not work there anymore, and the good ones are all of the outside of the building on a sunny day.
Meanwhile they are wondering whether to spend money on video.
You need both, and most companies are shorter on photos than you think. What each one is actually for, and why booking them separately costs you twice.
What photos do that video cannot
Photos are the workhorse and nobody treats them that way.
They go everywhere. A proposal, a spec sheet, a job posting, a trade show banner, the top of your website, a slide, a bid package, a business card. You need dozens, and you need them to look like the same company.
Nobody has to decide to look at them. This is the big one. A photo works in the three seconds somebody spends scanning a page. Video requires somebody to choose to press play, and most people do not.
They age slower in some ways and faster in others. A good photo of the work holds up for years. A photo with a person in it who left last spring is a problem the day they leave, which is why you want more of them than you think.
If your pictures are old, fix that first. It is cheaper than video and it is the thing a buyer sees first.
The one thing video does that a photo structurally cannot
A photo shows what something looks like.
Video is the only way to put a person in front of somebody and let them hear how they talk about their own work.
That is the whole difference, and it is bigger than it sounds. A buyer deciding between you and two other companies is not really evaluating your equipment. They are trying to figure out what it is going to be like to work with you, and whether you know what you are doing.
A picture cannot answer that. A person explaining a hard thing clearly can, in about forty seconds. That is also usually where companies lose people, because most of them cannot explain what they do in a way an outsider follows, and a photo lets you avoid finding that out.
Photos get seen. Video gets believed. You need the first to get the second watched.
Where each one actually gets used
Think about it as attention.
Photos carry the places where you get three seconds. Search results, the top of a page, a LinkedIn post somebody scrolls past, a proposal a committee is flipping through.
Video carries the places where somebody has already leaned in. The follow up email after a good call. The page a buyer comes back to a second time. The thing your sales guy sends when a deal has gone quiet. The interview a candidate watches before deciding whether to apply.
Neither one replaces the other, and buying only one leaves an obvious hole. All photos and you are a company nobody has heard speak. All video and nobody gets far enough to press play.
The mistake that actually costs money
Booking them separately.
Here is what most companies do. They hire a photographer in March. Then in September somebody decides they need video, and a different crew comes out.
You just paid twice for the same thing, and the expensive part was never the camera. It was getting access. Scheduling around production, cleaning up the floor, getting people to sit still, waiting on the light, finding out the machine is down. That happens on both days.
One day on site can produce both. The crew is already there, the lighting is already handled, the people are already scheduled and wearing a clean shirt. Pulling stills at that point is close to free compared to buying another day.
This is worth deciding before anybody shows up, not after. Same reason it is worth deciding what each piece is for ahead of time rather than sorting through footage later and hoping.
An honest note about pulling stills from video
You will hear that you can just grab frames out of the video and skip photos.
Partly true, and worth knowing where the line is.
Frames pulled from video are genuinely fine for your website, social posts, email, and most proposals. At the size those get viewed, nobody can tell.
They are not fine for anything printed large. A trade show banner, a magazine ad, a booth wall. Video frames are also captured with motion in mind, which means faces land mid blink and mid word more often than you would like.
So the answer is not either. It is that a day built for both gets you real photos and real video, and a day built only for video gets you real video and some usable pictures.
The test
Where is the hole right now?
Old or thin photos, decent understanding of your story. Start with photos. It is cheaper and it is what people see first.
Good current photos, but nobody can tell what you actually do from your website. That is a video problem, and photos will not fix it no matter how many you buy.
Both are old. Then do not buy them separately. One shoot day built for both costs less than two days built for one each, and everything matches, which is the part nobody expects to care about and then does.
The short version
It was never either or. Photos get you seen, video gets you believed, and most companies are short on photos and do not know it.
The money mistake is not picking wrong. It is buying them six months apart and paying twice for the same access.
If you are trying to decide which one to spend on this year, happy to look at what you have now and tell you which hole is actually costing you something.
Dylan Smith is the owner of With A Twist Media in Greensboro, NC. He has been making documentary style video for manufacturers and construction companies across the Triad since 2019.