Top tips: Look and Feel for Personal Brand Photography

Your look and feel is everything when it comes to connecting with your audience and is not to be underestimated when it comes to investing in a personal branding photoshoot. Let me tell you why and help you plan for your future business photoshoot.

When planning for a personal branding photoshoot for your business, one of the most important elements to take in to consideration is your unique look and feel a.k.a your brand image.

When I first get contacted by a client, we hop on a phone call so I can learn as much about them and their business as possible. This is so important for me because then I can create a photoshoot plan that perfectly suits my client and their needs. Every business is different so every branding photoshoot will be too!

Do you already know your brand identify? Even if you think you do, its always good to go back and revisit your why and your brand message, after all, sometimes we all need to reconnect with our business and see if we are still on the right track for ourselves.

Here are some questions you can start to ask yourself, especially important if you are at the beginning of your business journey or at the start of a rebrand. They can easily be skipped, overlooked and forgotten but they are actually vital in achieving a successful catalogue of images that will have longevity and authentically help grow your business.

• Who is your dream client?

• What are your brand colours? Are they bright and vibrant or calm and reflective?

• What emotion do you want your audience to feel when they see and interact with your content?

• What stories do you want to tell within your images?

• Who are you speaking to when you are posting your images or reels?

• What do you have planned in your marketing strategy for this year?

• Are you going to be launching a specific product or offering in the coming months?

• What different communication streams will you be using these images for?

For example, if you are a yoga teacher who focuses on meditation and spiritualness, your colours may be soft pastel based and calm because you want to show the tranquil atmosphere you have in your studio.

But you may be a yoga teacher who loves bright colours and laughter in their sessions as well as the stretching… so we wouldn’t want to use calm colours that speak of silence and tranquility, we would want to incorporate a blaze of colour that shout fun yoga!

Every business is different and unique and therefore your brand images should be so too!

Together we need to capture images that tell all of these things and more, to create a catalogue of content that allows the viewer to imagine the parts of the story that are missing but come to the conclusion that you are in fact the perfect fit for them.

Using storytelling within brand photography is key to connecting with your ideal client and taking the answers from these questions will help you identify who you are so we can together create personal brand photographs that authentically tell your story to your audience and also get them engaging with you!

Let’s go back to the questions at the beginning of my blog.

Get a pen and paper and start jotting down any ideas that spring to mind… not idea is wrong! Like any brainstorm, you need to write the rubbish out to find the golden bits so, get it all down on paper. Go away, have a cuppa and then come back and look through what you have written. Some ideas and thoughts will come to you when you are doing boring mundane things like in the shower or hoovering - I know because that happens to me a lot! Sometimes you can’t force the creative thoughts, they have to come to you!

I love to help my branding clients, who most often than not are female entrepreneurs; both start ups and established brands get clear on who they are, what their business is offering and what they need from their images for their business.

We don’t want to be wishy washy, we don’t want our audience to be confused with who we are because at the end of the day people buy from people so no-one wants to be mis sold!

So, I hear you asking, well I’ve done my list but how will this come into our personal branding shoot? Let me show you…

Colours

Your brand colours should be shown through your website and communications, in your logo and any graphics that you use in your marketing.

We will use clothes, props, wall colours, locations and anything else we can think of that will suit you and your brand to incorporate these colours as well.

I don’t mean that you have to be dressed head to toe in orange for example, but the colours should be there subtle or bold (depending on your brand feel) throughout your images.

Emotion

It can be tricky thinking about how emotions can be brought into your brand, but think about how you feel when looking at those people and businesses that you follow. You could be tapping in to a feeling you want them to know they will experience when they see you or you could be talking about emotions that you connect with personally to help develop their sense of knowing you.

Depending on your business, we will plan out where we may be able to creative these photos of you laughing, concentrating, meditating etc.

These are the storytelling images that I adore and sometimes we capture photographs within a shoot that we hadn’t even planned for or realised you might need/want in the future.

For example, Suzanne, a business coach had a full brand shoot with me and at the time of the shoot she wanted specific ‘feels’ of photos to portray freedom and confidence in growing your business. However, she recently used the images shown below in a post where she’s speaks about her loss of self belief and how she herself felt stuck and uninspired. These photos perfectly portray this message she is telling her audience and we didn’t even aim to get these photos either!

Stories

Stories are how people connect with the person and brand! People buy from people so tell them about who you are, who you love, your why, you dreams, your plans for the future, tell them stories and emotions that your dream client will resonate with.

In images these can be more abstract or arty, the words will tell the story more than the image or they can be a more photojournalistic style where the details in the image speak the story.

Locations come in here especially, what places will help tell these stories or help you connect? Will it just be in your place of work like your office or kitchen counter or yoga studio? Or would outdoor locations also be good to be in. A busy cafe, quiet library or walking by a river.

Think hard about your stories as these may actually be the place to begin building your brand image.

Strategy

Who are you talking to and on what platform? These are key as well because Instagram is very different to Linkedin so it is good to mindful of this to ensure we capture photographs that will suit where you need then to be.

Also, what are you planning for your business in this year, what offers, new things, new team members, changes, developments will you be aiming for?

It’s good to have these things in mind so we can ensure we capture enough photographs for them to have longevity, you don’t want to spend money on branding images that don’t last long enough for you to use them when you really need them!

What other ways of communicating will you be doing? For example, will you be using graphics a lot to tell your audience details? If so, we need to ensure we frame your photos to work for this, or make then against a blank background for easy cut outs.

Now you know a little more of how we will use these things to plan our shoot here, the next step is to go in to details:

• What props do you use in your business and how can we incorporate them in our shoot?

• What locations do work in/ you want to tell your stories through?

• What clothes do you want to wear? In brand colours? How many outfits would you need?

• What angles/ shot list do we have? (I will be writing another blog on this shortly (must have brand photo shots)

So, with all that in mind go forth and get planning for your brand photography! Feel free to ask any questions, I am more than happy to help!

I am currently in the middle of finalising a brand new personal branding photography subscription service, which I am super excited about!

It is so much more than just brand photos and will include multiple photography shoots, personalised stock photo access, brand content strategy, planning guides, creative support for brand look and feels and more!

If you are interested to learn more you can sign up by emailing me here ahead of the wait list link being launched!