As you prepare for your brand photoshoot, you need to ask yourself, 'have you got your brand strategy in place?"
A clearly defined brand, will help you plan, prepare and brief a photographer so that your expectations are met. Being able to articulate your brand story and values helps to create the scene and ensure you and your photographer are on the same creative page.
As an experienced marketeer, I have created a lot of brands during my career, so I can not stress enough the importance of ensuring you have a clear brand identity. If you need help with this step, I offer a Brand Strategy power session through The Marketing Power Hour - this power session is designed to help you create a brand strategy, a brand identity, ie HOW it looks and how to roll it out across your marketing and communication touch-points.
Understanding how your photographs will be used is an important next step, so consider whether you are using them for a particular project or you are looking to build or refresh your existing image library. If you intend to use them for your website and social media think about the structure of your website and also your social media content plan. By doing this you will be in a better position to determine your Shot List.
Building a brand or refreshing a brand, can be confusing. As a marketeer with over 20 years of experience, I find it is important to build the right team who are collectively on the same page and able to advocate the best for your brand.
If you are using a freelancer or marketing agency to help guide you, it is always a good idea to have a pre photoshoot 'meet' to ensure your vision is communicated to the team as a whole, involve your photographer as it may surprise you the details they think about, which other's may not have done.
A tight brief is always the best planning tool to ensure the photographs captured are the ones you want. If you envisage a particular image, make sure you have the props available. As a general rule, you will need a great HERO image, a super portrait for your about page and a mix of images to tell your story.
In terms of style, personal brands are all the rage but they don't work for everyone nor are they always great for every business. As part of your brand strategy, you need to think about your brand personality and decide if images of you, ie you being the face of your business, is appropriate or if the overall look or to make it more should be more product/ service-based.
Recently a client asked to work with me because she wanted to put the focus back onto her clients and how they would feel using her products. So we created a series of lifestyle shots to create an emotional connection to the brand and products, which her clients absolutely loved.
As a brand photographer and a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, I have the experience, knowledge and skills to ensure your photoshoot delivers on your expectations. To do that we need to follow a proven formula to ensure everything runs smoothly.
The Team Pre-Meet
Generally, I do these over Zoom or Teams. Here we discuss the ideas in your photography brief and then raise any questions or queries and make sure we are all clear on the direction. I like to have all the team members on the call so that we can have a full and comprehensive chat, and make sure we aren't missing anything.
In that meeting, we will decide who is the Art Director. It sounds intimidating, but it isn't. Simply the Art Director takes the lead responsibility to ensure there is a full shot list, the locations are decided and the shoot is styled so that your/the models' outfits complement your brand colours, brand personality and the location/s we are shooting in. The Art Director can be me, you or an agency/ stylist you are working with.
In our 'meet' we will go through a checklist of items:
The Photography Brief, I have a template so let me know if you would like me to email this over to you. The brief will cover the following items,
The Mood Board, Pinterest is a great way to create a mood board and you can pin outfits, poses, props and anything else that is related to your brand. Share this with me so that we can check it aligns to your brief.
Turnaround time
Generally, my turnaround time is two weeks. This gives me the chance to select and edit your hero shots, lifestyle and accessory images, and ensure they fit with your brand and deliverables from your brief.
What I deliver
For a 1/2 day shoot, I aim to deliver around 30 edited images to you. This will generally compromise of:
For a full day or more shoot, we can go into more detail about deliverables, including content creation and videography work.
The proofing process
I will deliver the first proof via my Claire Benson Photography proofing site. We will arrange a 'meet' online where we will talk about the images and we will discuss your picked hero shots.
Once the editing and proofing are complete, I move the final images to an online storage space for you, where your images are saved as Jpegs and Tiffs.