There are conversations that feel like a meeting. And then there are the ones that feel like a continuation.
Here’s what nobody says about being photographed.
Your brand photography is only as good as what happened in the room.
You can have the best glass, the most beautiful location, the outfit that finally makes you feel like yourself. And if you don’t feel safe in front of that lens, none of it comes through. None of it.
My job is to make you forget I’m doing my job. To create enough ease that you stop posing and start existing. That you say something actually funny and laugh before you remember you’re on camera. That moment, the one right before you recompose yourself, that’s the shot.
I’ve been chasing it for eight years. It never gets old.
Kim Davidson Jones is why I do this work.
She’s the founder of Lock and Key Home Organization in Louisville, KY and she has been in front of my camera long enough that we have a whole history together. A whole evolution. She came in nervous once. She doesn’t anymore.
For this brand photography session, she chose a client’s home. She showed up in a wardrobe she had carefully put together, not to look like herself, to look like the next version of herself. The team director. The business owner who has built something real and knows it now.
She sat down in front of my camera and immediately had this huge smile on her face. Not a photograph smile. A real one. The kind that happens when you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be and you know it.
We shot her solo images. Then with her team leads. Then we all piled into the back of the Lock and Key work van and nobody was performing anything. They were laughing. Cracking jokes the way they do every single day on the job. I was shooting as fast as I could and laughing along with them, which is not my most technically disciplined work but it might be my favorite kind.
We wrapped in the backyard as the afternoon light did exactly what afternoon light does when you let it. Short video clips. Good energy. At some point we both said the same thing at the same time.
We could shoot together all day.
The images Kim walked away with look like Kim. They look like her brand. They look like the leader she has become, and her audience feels that in every frame. Approachable, sharp, a little funny, completely herself.
That alignment is the whole job. Every time.
Episode 13 is 48 minutes and worth every one of them. Jessie and Jaime built Talk Branding To Me as a space for honest, intelligent conversations about building a real brand and a brand photography library, and this episode gets into all of it. What to do if you hate being photographed. How to know if you need a mini session or a full brand experience. How to find a photographer who actually gets what you’re trying to build.
Go listen.
Listen to Episode 13 on Apple Podcasts here.
And if you’ve been thinking about a Brand Experience, I’d love to hear where you are right now.
Muse: Kim Davidson Jones of Lock and Key Home Organization
Read the Comments +