When you need photographs regularly for your business, a handful of headshots doesn’t go very far.

For Kate from Curate Media, we created a much larger personal branding library during a half-day shoot, with images designed to give her plenty of options for her website, social media and ongoing marketing.

Rather than photographing in the studio, I hired a light-filled showhome in Hamilton for the session. This gave us multiple spaces to work with while still keeping the overall look of the gallery cohesive.

One location, lots of different looks

A good location can give us far more variety than it might initially seem.

Throughout the showhome we photographed in the kitchen, dining and living areas, along with smaller sofa nooks and different corners of the property.

Within those spaces I changed angles, crops, positioning and how Kate interacted with the environment, so we weren’t simply creating the same photograph with a different room behind her.

We also worked through multiple outfits to add another layer of variation while keeping everything consistent with her overall brand.

Creating content, not just portraits

Alongside more traditional portraits and headshots, we created plenty of images of Kate actually doing things.

Working on her laptop. Using her phone. Sitting on the floor. Moving through the space. Looking away from the camera. Detail photographs. Wider images with plenty of room around her. Even a little intentional motion blur.

These are the photographs that become incredibly useful when you need content regularly.

Not every image on your website needs your face filling the frame, and not every social media post needs you staring directly down the barrel of the camera while talking about your latest service.

Planning for where the photographs will be used

One of the things I’m thinking about throughout a branding shoot is where the finished photographs might eventually need to go.

That means creating different orientations and crops, photographing some images much wider than others, leaving negative space where useful and capturing both strong portraits and supporting imagery.

For Kate, a half-day session gave us enough time to work through those variations without rushing from one setup to the next.

The finished gallery became a broad library of personal branding imagery rather than simply a collection of photographs from one afternoon.