More than a couple headshots...
How do you spend time in front of the camera during your portrait session?
If it’s all about headshots and portraits where you’re looking into the camera, you’re leaving valuable opportunities to create compelling imagery that speaks to your audience on the table.
Yes, promotional photos are vital for many areas of your online presence, including your speaker/media kits, website and social profiles.
But, in order to create a comprehensive image portfolio that truly captivates your audience’s attention and invites them to visualize what it’s like to work directly with you, you also need candid lifestyle portraits showing them how the sausage is made.
It’s not enough to talk about how you solve your client’s challenges, you need to show them what that looks like, too.
And that point was stressed during a recent strategy call with Diane OConnell.
While, yes, we certainly accounted for the fact that she needed to update her current roster of headshots and portraits, we also went down the rabbit hole of identifying how she serves her people.
It was through that conversation that we identified a couple key services that she offers clients:
In-person facilitation and virtual meetings.
While she didn’t have an actual room of clients in person or on Zoom available to shoot during her session, we faked it to give the impression of what it looks like in a real-life scenario.
Now, if there was a room full of people, that would offer a wealth of visual storytelling opportunities that are great to share online, not only for you, but for those who are also in the room.
But, when it comes to key visual elements needed to satisfy your immediate image content holes, you being front and center in those photos is more than enough.
It gives your audience a small taste of what it looks like to be in that room with you.
As a result, during the second half of Diane’s session, we captured her in front of the room facilitating and on a screen speaking.
In order to make the room feel less empty for the facilitation photos, I threw our laptops, and some cups, on the table to help fill the frame.
As for the empty Zoom room, I focused on shooting Diane in speaker mode, while placing my laptop in a room with interesting visual elements in the background to make it look more interesting and dynamic.
The result?
Compelling and genuine images that capture her dynamically imparting her expertise for those she serves.
Before you book your next photoshoot, remember that the lifestyle portraits of how you serve your people need to be accounted for in order to round out your image portfolio that offers your design team a wealth of options when creating your marketing and promotional images.
More work and effort to get this done? Sure.
A little weird speaking to no one in the room but yourself? You bet.
But ultimately, the juice is worth the squeeze.