Put on your dancing shoes...
While there are many factors that lead to a successful portrait session, there is one, primary objective that must be met:
Your image portfolio needs to DANCE.
What do I mean?
When flipping through the photos, there is a distinct change in one or more of these areas from shot to shot:
Composition - you’re placed in different areas of the frame - left, right, and center
Angle - the photos are taken from a low, high and eye-level vantage point
Expression - exhibiting aspects of your personality that you want to convey to your audience.
Body language - standing, sitting, leaning, looking into the distance, and changing your posture throughout
Actions - candidly engaging in day-to-day business and life activities
Coloring - full color or black and white
Lighting - open-faced, bright and warm lighting to more dramatic look
Emotion - based on the combination of all the above, this creates a wealth of sentiments that span the emotional spectrum
Why is all of this important?
When looking to position yourself as the go-to authority in your space of expertise, that requires a lot of marketing and promotional collateral to support that goal for every single touchpoint across your entire online presence.
For proof, look at all of the heavy hitters that you follow online and see how much content they produce and share with their audiences.
And, they don’t simply use the same 3-5 photos on repeat. Or the same 3-5 videos on repeat, for that matter.
They have a systematic approach to refreshing their feeds in order to maintain and reinforce their perception of excellence.
But, if you have an image portfolio of 200 photos where 180 look and feel the same, then you don’t have the visual assets needed to achieve a similar goal.
That’s why baking in visual variety into your portfolio as described above from shot to shot is so important in your next portrait session.
This will provide your design team a wealth of options when putting together your website, newsletter, optins, .pdfs, speaker/media kit, and other marketing assets.
Don’t simply show up to your photoshoot and hope for the best - prepare with a strategic mindset and make sure your photographer is on the same page as you.