Personal branding session

A headshot answers what you look like. This answers what you do, which needs hands, tools, a workspace and deliberate empty space around the subject for text to sit in. A branding session delivers sixty images in horizontal, vertical and square crops rather than ten tight portraits, because the files have to survive a website header, a slide, a newsletter and a vertical story — four aspect ratios that no single crop serves.

Bring three outfits across a range of formality, and the objects your work actually involves: a laptop that is yours, a camera you use, ingredients, fabric, a notebook that has been written in. The props people bring because they seem professional photograph as props, and every viewer can tell. The ones they use every day photograph as work.

The session comes with a content calendar suggesting how the set spreads across a year, and that is the part that changes what the sixty images are worth. Posted in a week they are a burst that ends; spread deliberately they are twelve months of not having to think about it. The calendar also shapes the shoot — knowing that four of these need to be quiet backgrounds with room for a headline means four of them get photographed that way rather than cropped into it afterwards.

Two and a half hours across two or three locations is the practical ceiling, and the constraint is wardrobe rather than travel: each change costs about ten minutes that has to come from somewhere. Sixty retouched photographs within seven business days, with a commercial licence for your own business use. From $650. If what you actually need is one good photograph of your face, the headshot session is the honest recommendation and it costs less than half.