Aim for "good coverage" from your portrait session
It’s not a matter of quantity.
It’s a matter of quality and versatility.
For several clients that have stepped in front of my camera, they’ve walked into our session with one common challenge.
Here’s the gist:
They had a portrait session with another photographer which they felt went really well.
As they checked out the photos during the shoot, everything was looking good.
The photographer had great communication with them, and they felt engaged and encouraged from beginning to end.
Several days after the session, they received an email with a link to a gallery that had an obscene amount of photos.
Ohhh, very exciting, right?
But when they looked at the shots, they all basically looked and felt the same from shot-to-shot.
Ugh, not very exciting.
And therein lies a huge issue: It’s not enough to be handed enough photos that you can choke on.
While the raw numbers might be impressive, the flexibility with which to leverage these photos is limited at best.If you use one image from the pile, that cancels out the 20 or so that look and feel similar to that shot.
And a large chunk of your image content portfolio is useless.
The value in your branded lifestyle portrait session does not lie in the amount of shots - it’s the diversity, versatility and possibilities with these photos that matter most.
As a speaker, author and expert-based business owner looking to post everywhere across your online presence, you need a wide variety of images, regardless of the locations, outfit and session time restrictions.
Each photo has a purpose that can be leveraged in a unique way based on the emotional sentiment that photo produces.
Some will be used to rebuild your website. Others are earmarked for social media posts. The rest are for a variety of other uses, including your presentations, digital ads and printed material needs.
And you can’t use the same 3 photos for everything.
That’s why I ensure that every client walks out of their sessions with a mixed and valuable bag of diverse, authentic and persuasive image content.
For example, take one lifestyle scenario for a session I had with a client.
It’s the same outfit, same activity, but there are different angles, framing and expression from shot-to-shot which creates much more overall versatility.
A good rule of thumb when determining whether you have a diverse and versatile image content portfolio is when you quickly scroll through the album, it feels like you’re watching a video based on all of the different angles, framing, body language and expression changes on your face.
So, when you post one photo from this subset of your entire portfolio, the other photos are still in play because they all feel different from the one before to the one after.
In television production language, this would be referred to as having “good coverage” of the scene.
And that’s exactly what many of you are lacking.
Before your next branded lifestyle portrait session, qualify potential photographers about the way in which he or she approaches “good coverage.” Make sure they understand the concept and are able to execute on this plan.
The last thing you want to do is end up with an album that has minimum creative flexibility.
Otherwise, you’ll end up calling another photographer to fill in the holes that the first photographer dug deeply.
Turning to you…
Do you currently have an image content portfolio full of beautiful photos that you can’t use because they all look the same? How have you been working around it?
Please share your story in the comment section and let’s talk about it.
PS - If you’d like to learn more about persuasive visual storytelling, sign up for my blog so you will have every new article sent directly to your inbox - why waste time on commuting, right? :)