One of the things I hear from business owners before a personal branding shoot is:
“But what photos do I actually need?”
And it’s a very good question.
Because if you’re investing in professional photography for your business, you don’t just need a folder full of lovely photographs of yourself.
You need useful photographs.
Images for your website. Social media. LinkedIn. Blog posts. Emails. Launches. Press features. Canva graphics. About pages. Sales pages. The inevitable Tuesday morning when you’ve written a brilliant Instagram caption and suddenly realise you have absolutely nothing to put with it.
A good personal branding shoot should give you a varied bank of photographs that you can actually use.
So, what should be on the shot list?
1. A strong, traditional headshot
Let’s start with the obvious one.
Yes, you absolutely still need a good headshot.
Your LinkedIn profile, website About page, speaker bio, press features and anywhere else where people simply need to see you.
But professional doesn’t have to mean stiff, corporate or uncomfortable.
The aim is a photograph that looks polished while still looking like the actual human someone is going to meet when they work with you.
2. A wider portrait in your workspace
Now we start adding context.
Showing you in your office, studio, treatment room, shop or wherever your business actually happens immediately tells people more about you.
Your surroundings become part of your brand story.
And if you work from home? That absolutely counts too.
3. You actually doing your job
This is one of the biggest things people forget when planning branding photographs.
What do your clients actually pay you to do?
Photograph that.
If you’re a chef, let’s see you cooking. If you’re a maker, show the making. If you’re a therapist, we can show you preparing your space or working in an appropriate way. If you’re a shop owner, let’s get you amongst your products.
These photographs help potential clients picture what working with you actually looks like.
4. The little details
Not every photograph needs your face in it.
In fact, some of the most useful branding photographs don’t.
Hands working, tools, notebooks, ingredients, equipment, packaging and all the little details that are part of what you do make brilliant supporting images.
They’re especially handy when you’ve already posted your face three times that week and are beginning to feel like you’re running your own fan account.
5. Your products, tools and brand details
What objects instantly say your business?
Your products, tools, packaging, books, equipment, stationery or branded materials deserve photographs of their own.
These are brilliant for websites, blogs, social posts and backgrounds for graphics.
They also help build the wider visual story of your business without you having to appear in every single photograph.
6. You interacting with clients
People want to know what it feels like to work with you.
Client interaction photographs can help enormously with that.
Rather than simply telling someone that you’re friendly, approachable, knowledgeable or supportive, we can show them.
Obviously this depends on your business and client confidentiality, but where it’s appropriate, these images are incredibly useful.
7. Photographs with negative space
This one isn’t particularly glamorous, but your graphic designer will want to hug me.
Some photographs should deliberately leave space around you.
Why?
Because that’s where the words go.
Website banners, Canva graphics, adverts, social posts, email headers and promotional material all become considerably easier to create when you’ve got images with usable negative space.
I photograph with the eventual use of the image in mind, not simply whether it looks pretty in your gallery.
8. Horizontal images for your website
Instagram may have trained us all to think vertically, but websites haven’t got the memo.
Website banners, page headers and blog headers often need good horizontal images.
So part of your branding shoot should be planned around where your photographs are going to live.
Because discovering afterwards that your favourite image absolutely will not fit the giant skinny banner at the top of your website is, technically speaking, a pain in the arse.
9. Something that shows your personality
This is where we can have some fun.
You are not a logo with legs.
People buy from people, particularly in small businesses where you are a huge part of the brand.
So if you’re colourful, funny, quiet, rebellious, bookish, outdoorsy, glamorous, gloriously nerdy or incapable of taking yourself seriously for more than six consecutive minutes, I want some of that in your photographs.
10. The everyday business stuff
Phones. Laptops. Notebooks. Meetings. Emails. Calls.
Not terribly exciting on paper, but incredibly useful in a branding gallery.
Why?
Because you probably talk about things connected to your everyday work all the time.
A photograph of you using your laptop can accompany dozens of completely different pieces of content without feeling out of place.
That’s exactly the sort of mileage I want you to get from your branding photographs.
11. Variety. Lots of it.
And finally, this might actually be the most important one.
A good branding gallery should give you more than different poses.
It should give you genuinely different images for different jobs.
Think professional portraits for your website and LinkedIn, relaxed images for social media, photographs showing your interests and personality, images of you working, content that supports the different things you talk about, and plenty that simply makes people feel like they know the person behind the business.
All of the photographs in this collage of Jill came from the same branding session.
Same woman. Same business.
Very different images.
Because you don’t need 50 photographs of yourself smiling at the camera in slightly different positions.
You need a useful bank of images you can keep reaching for when you’re writing a blog, updating your website, launching something, posting on social media or thinking:
“Oh for goodness’ sake, what am I going to put with this post?”
That is what a personal branding session should give you.
Your branding shoot should be built around your business
There isn’t one universal personal branding shot list.
A therapist needs something different from a chef. A shop owner needs something different from an author. A coach needs something different from a maker.
That’s why before a personal branding session with me, we talk about your business, your clients and where you actually need photographs.
We can think about what you sell, what you regularly talk about, which pages of your website need images, what you have coming up over the next few months and the different sides of your personality that you want your clients to see.
From there, we build the shot list.
Because the goal isn’t simply to leave your session thinking:
“Ooh, that’s a nice photograph of me.”
Although obviously, I want that too.
The real goal is to open your gallery and think:
“Bloody hell, I can use these everywhere.”
Ready to build your own image library?
If you’ve been recycling the same three photographs of yourself for the last two years, consider this your gentle intervention.
My personal branding photography sessions are designed to give small business owners a varied, useful library of professional images that actually feel like them.
From polished headshots to behind-the-scenes details, working photographs, personality shots and all the useful bits in between, we’ll plan your session around what your business actually needs.
