For Trudy’s personal branding shoot, we used Hamilton CBD as our backdrop, creating a large collection of professional portraits across several different locations without needing to spend half the session driving around the city.

We photographed around historic buildings, modern architecture, greenery, cafés and some of the quieter corners of central Hamilton, along with professional headshots in the studio.

Combined with several outfit changes, one relatively small area gave us a surprisingly big range of images.

Creating variety around Hamilton CBD

One of my favourite things about photographing personal branding sessions in central Hamilton is how quickly the surroundings can change.

Walk a few minutes and we can move from greenery and outdoor seating to a historic building, clean architectural lines, glass, concrete or a completely different streetscape.

For Trudy’s shoot, we deliberately used those differences to create several distinct sets of photographs without needing a long list of locations.

Different outfits for different looks

Trudy brought several outfits, including more corporate options as well as a lighter white dress.

Changing wardrobe alongside the location gave us another easy way to create variety.

Her suit and navy blouse worked beautifully around the more modern and architectural locations, while the white dress created a completely different feel around the greenery and historic buildings.

The result looks more like several separate shoots than one session spent walking around the CBD.

Professional without photographing everything in an office

Personal branding photographs don’t necessarily need to be taken inside your workplace to look professional.

For Trudy, the architecture and city environment gave us plenty of context without tying every photograph to one specific office or building.

We created everything from traditional direct-to-camera portraits through to seated photographs, full-length images and more relaxed options, giving her different levels of formality depending on where the photographs would eventually be used.

Adding studio headshots to the session

We also included clean professional headshots in the studio, giving Trudy another style of imagery alongside the environmental portraits.

I love combining the two when someone needs a substantial professional image library. The studio gives us consistency and simplicity for places where a traditional headshot works best, while the location photographs provide much more variety for websites, marketing and ongoing content.

A lot of variety without travelling far

You don’t need five completely separate locations to make a personal branding gallery look varied.

Different backgrounds, pockets of light, architecture, outfits, posing and crops can completely change an image, even when everything is photographed within a relatively small part of the city.

For Trudy, that meant we could create a large gallery spanning corporate portraits, relaxed branding imagery, city photographs and studio headshots without spending half the shoot getting in and out of the car.