Most of the people who come to me for personal brand photography are women, but men need personal branding, too!

It was fun getting the opportunity to shoot photos for a guy this time around. We found the perfect studio in Orlando with the edge and warmth we were going for. We spent 2 hours in the studio and 2 hours out in the wild, but for me, the real money shots were the ones I got in the studio.

Kevin is a web developer developing an off-shoot of his company to provide consultation to companies on their digital operations. It’s a service he noticed he was already often doing for clients for free and this is an excellent way to build new products for your customers! Notice what you’re already doing but not productizing and voila! New product or service.

I’m a big Seth Godin fan. In one of his many books, he says not to keep trying to find new customers for your brand. Build your tribe and start developing new products/services for them, not the other way around. This is what Kevin is doing and it’s a mission I was able to instantly grab onto and begin developing with Kevin using my branding process that included so much more than photos.

I collaborated with Kevin for about a month leading up to his session to begin the work of fleshing out this brand way before setting out to take the pictures that will be just a small part of his overall brand image.

In the early days of preparing for a personal brand photography session with a client, I invite them to fill out a questionnaire with questions like “what is your brand value statement?” Along with this question, I present a worksheet I developed to dig up that answer. Sometimes, clients want to work together to answer that question which opens a can of branding worms such as “what is my brand’s why, how, what?” and “what are my customers’ bleeding, human pain points?” Over the course of 3 meetings, I workshopped with Kevin to answer these questions and synthesize all of this information into a document that will eventually grow into a full brand bible.

Armed with this work, we headed to the studio to create some imagery of Kevin that aligned with the brand we were building.

After the images were edited, I used them to brand the document we had been working on so we ended up with some great slides like this: