Personal branding photography doesn’t need to mean standing against a wall and smiling at the camera for an hour.

Kirsty Cobham is a hairstylist with her own home salon, and for her branding shoot we created a collection of warm, polished and playful imagery that gave her plenty of options to use across her business.

Photographed in my Hamilton studio, we used natural light, multiple outfits and a mixture of portraits and more relaxed branding images to create plenty of variety within one shoot.

Creating images that actually feel like the person

Kirsty’s branding needed to feel professional, but it also needed some personality.

We photographed everything from clean portraits looking directly at the camera through to more relaxed seated images, movement, detail shots and photographs incorporating tools from her work as a hairstylist.

Changing outfits and areas within the studio also allowed us to create different looks without the finished gallery feeling like several completely unrelated photoshoots.

More than a new headshot

One of the biggest differences between a headshot session and a personal branding shoot is the variety we’re able to create.

A great headshot absolutely has its place, but when you’re regularly marketing your own business, you also need photographs that can sit behind website copy, introduce a service, accompany a social media post or simply show a little more personality.

For Kirsty, that meant creating a mixture of closer portraits, full-length photographs, seated images, detail shots and more playful photographs connected to what she actually does.

The result was a much broader library of content while still keeping everything recognisably her.