Booking a branding photoshoot can feel overwhelming. When you are a woman running a small business, you already have an overflowing to-do list, and the last thing you need is yet another thing to figure out.
Most of the questions women ask me before a branding photoshoot aren’t really about photography – they are about uncertainty.
What will I wear? What will I do? Will I have to pose? What if I don’t know what images I need? What if I’m awkward in front of the camera? If you’ve never had a branding photoshoot before, here’s what actually happens.
You don’t need to arrive with a list of ideas
This is one of the biggest misconceptions. Often when I speak to a potential client they say something like “I’m not creative”. That is my job and I’ve written more about it in another blog: “You don’t need an idea”.
And if you’re curious what happens at the planning stage, have a look at this post about booking and planning process: “Booking a branding photoshoot doesn’t have to be a big task”.
Once the planning is done and the day of the shoot comes, here is what actually happens.
We start with a conversation, not photos
Usually, I arrive about 15 minutes before the shoot time. We have a chat first and offload the morning stress (if you happened to have one of those mornings with socks dramas). It helps us both transition into the right frame of mind.
We also walk through the rooms we are going to use and go through the outfits you’ve chosen. Even though we talk about outfits during our planning call, often clients end up wearing something else, just because they felt like it on the day or I made a suggestion that something goes better.
While we chat, I am paying attention to the way you talk and move in your space, the little details you might not think about (e.g. one client had a heart shape in various forms everywhere because she loves it, but it wasn’t mentioned before, so we just included it in her photos). I will also be planning lighting and framing in my head, but that’s the bit you don’t have to even think about.
You won’t spend two hours standing and smiling at the camera
Most people imagine branding photography as endless headshots and posing. In reality, it has a flow. Being photographed is quite tiring, so we alternate between types of images and build in breaks. Breaks also happen naturally when you change an outfit or I rearrange my lighting. We transition between different stories and different types of images as we go.
So portraits are only one type of image that we create. I have written in more detail about the different types of images we can create in this blog: “Beyond the Usual Checklist: 9 Branding Photos Your Small Business Needs”.
The goal isn’t only to show what you look like. The goal is to help your audience understand how you work, how you think and what kind of person you are.
A headshot can tell people what you look like. A branding photoshoot can tell them what it’s like to work with you. Those are different things.
You don’t need to know how to pose
When I say “my photos aren’t posed”, I am not saying the whole truth. They are directed. I do help you to position your body in a way that is flattering. However, I don’t have a “posing flow” and I won’t put you in a pose you would never assume spontaneously. Someone said to me this morning that when she had her headshots done, she was asked to do a “chin resting on a fist” pose, which felt awkward because she never actually sits like that.
So I will be asking you to tilt your head this way or that, bring your chin forward or turn slightly. But this is not to put you in a certain pose, but to work around the ways that cameras can distort our bodies and faces, so that you still look like yourself despite being flattened into a two dimensional image.
And that’s my job to be aware of all this, not yours, because you’re not a professional model.
“Well, that was fun, actually”
Most people feel nervous before their branding photoshoot and leave saying some version of that. Usually, they are surprised by how quickly the time has passed, how they stopped being self-conscious pretty soon and how much fun it was. After all, how often do you get to have a couple hours that are all about you?
