Personal Branding Photography. Why Is It Important

Personal branding photography is something that needs almost anyone nowadays. With the current technologies, it feels easy to reach your audience and share some of your creations with the public. Since it’s harder to be personal online, the first impressions you give are very important. Here comes personal branding photography.

Who needs personal branding photography?

Nowadays so many people write personal blogs, share their experiences, cook recipes, write books, play music, dance, paint, and do fitness and yoga classes. All of these activities are vibrant and amazing. In the 21st century, we can not only do what we love but also share it with others. Just some 50 years ago you couldn’t stream your work for thousands of people on the internet. You could only share your work through world of mouth and a local newspaper. Today you can stream everything online. But others can do that too. All the businesses and freelancers create a lot of noise and an overload of information. So you can easily get lost in it.

Especially sad that many people who spend the majority of time improving their work and service, learning a lot and trying to be the best experts in their field, often don’t get noticed among the ones who work more on marketing and less on quality.

Here comes the help of good and professional personal branding photography. It helps you to showcase yourself better and makes you stand out among others.

The mistakes business and professionals do.

I have done hundreds of photoshoots and noticed many times that people do not pay enough attention to the quality of their design and style. And not only online. I talk about the design of all little things. Starting from your studio(if you have one), the way you greet people and the style of your clothes. Ending with your social media, website design and even the perfume you use. You don’t need to overdo it, just understand throughout. The first time you meet these people, they don’t know anything about you, and the first impression they get is how you look, smell and talk.

With personal branding photography, it’s the same. If you upload a picture taken on a frontal camera of your phone wearing an old hoodie and wait for people to take you seriously, it won’t work. If you upload some pictures of your products taken on your phone – it also won’t look as amazing. I have done dozens of photoshoots for restaurants and noticed that I often had to specifically remind to prepare nice plates and cutlery as well as other decorations. It would be such a waste to do a photo shoot where everything would look messy and unappealing. When doing personal branding photoshoot it’s better to invest more in preparation for it since these images are the face of your business. Event photography can be often just for memories but personal branding business photography will represent your work and yourself

be self-critical and trust the professionals

On many photoshoots, I noticed that people want to implement their ideas without discussing them with a photographer. I understand that I could be even better at photography if I started listening to the masters earlier. It’s also very important for a photographer to listen very carefully to what his client says. I think the best photographers are quite modest and know how to listen. But for everything like photography, it’s often easy to feel like an expert without having the expertise. In my article about photographer’s self-esteem, I tell about the famous “Dunning–Kruger effect”. The main point of this means that we understand our expertise in something, as good as we are at this.

First Comes Your Presentation

The client doesn’t come first. First comes your service presentation and personal branding.

I did that mistake too. Some 6 years ago I wanted to work as a portrait photographer without having a good portfolio. Of course, if you want to prepare some training courses for yoga, or write articles or music… you need to present yourself first.

Look at the stories of success. For example, David Bowie not always was popular. For years he was in the search of his unique style and only then he became famous. Try to find your unique style and tell people about that and then you will get clients.

Things you can do for creating good personal branding photography

Try to discuss the mood of your work and your business

The mood is the first thing that stands behind good personal branding photography. A good photograph has a clear message that conveys your style. At the same time, a bad photograph will be vague and look pointless.

To make a good personal branding photoshoot the photographer needs to learn more about your brand, yourself and the way you work. Since a photoshoot like that is a whole project that will present you to a big audience of clients you need to ensure to make it personal and with the right mood. So when choosing a photographer for personal branding make sure he understands and listens to your story and is ready to tell this story through photography.

Choose about 3-5 colours for your whole brand.

Minimalism is very important as well as minimalism in colours. I suggest using only 3-5 colours for your personal branding photography and the whole brand. And the main colours should be paler and 1-2 bright colours can give the whole style a hint. I’ve seen many successful brands which have a very bad colour design. But none of them become outstanding because the flashiness of their colours creates this huge colouristic noise. When you notice truly well-designed brands, you can see straight away that it looks expensive and well-made. For personal branding photography, it’s the same. It’s even more important for photographs to be consistent in colours.

I would recommend discussing the colours with the photographer as well as discussing the mood of the photoshoot. I have been learning to see the colours for years as well as studying that in a university. And I’m pretty sure that other photographers did the same too, at least some of them since it’s our job after all.

If you have experience and knowledge in colour theory I would suggest using coolors.co since this website offers pallet creation. It is a helpful service and I used it a couple of times. Even if you have been learning colour theory for a long, it’s sometimes hard to pick the colours right from your imagination. The only thing to remember is that this service doesn’t replace the work of a real stylist, designer or photographer.

Try to be yourself and be genuine

If you try to show yourself in a way that is different from what you are it will look fake. With the same result, you can put some stock images but it will make your business look like a business made from a template.

People often ask me: “How should I look in the photographs?”. I always reply that you should be yourself, relaxed and self-confident. If you truly show your intention to provide the best quality products and services people will trust you. If your services are not as good and you’re pretending then why do you do the thing in the first place? Then you need to reread that paragraph and improve your service to get clients after that.

Anyways, I don’t think that people who search for personal branding photography might not want to provide the best quality service, so just be yourself and you will get great pictures

Personal branding photography is for you!

Whenever you create your website or social media or physical material or need to promote a project that you create, you’d need a series of images showing to people the uniqueness and authenticity of your work. Showing it in beautiful photographs can attract people and showing bad images can be even worse than not showing anything at all.

I wish you a lot of luck in your work, together we will make this world a better place. Remember that working on your visual representation will help you to show people how much you care about every aspect of your business.

If you enjoy my photography and would like to learn more about me and see more of my photographs you can visit my homepage. Aside from that, I have a blog post about my portrait photography in Berlin.

If you would like to order a photo shoot from me please get in touch and I will be happy to discuss all the details.