How to Prepare for A Photoshoot: 6 Tips for Success
To elevate your personal brand and online presence, you’ve got to have good pictures. Period. If you’ve decided to invest in professional photography- good for you! Here’s how to prepare for a photoshoot.
I can easily design a good website for you with whatever you’ve got. With professional photography, I can design an AMAZING site.
Professional photos will go a long way to help make your website look extra professional, make you feel more accessible and relatable to your ideal customer and give you a real sense of CONFIDENCE about your business.
I often get questions from clients asking for photographer referrals, but website clients are also curious to know what they need to do to prepare for their photoshoot.
Here are my suggestions. Keep in mind your brand photographer will also have more helpful tips.
1. Define your brand attributes
What do I mean by brand attributes? For starters just answer these two questions, they will help you figure out the vibe you’re going for when you prepare for a photoshoot:
What feelings should your services or products evoke?
What 3-5 words or phrases would you use to describe your business? (think in terms of a personality)
One of the key goals of your website photoshoot is to visually capture your brand. Don’t skip this step.
2. Create a mood board for your website photoshoot
Using the answers you came up with in the first step, create a mood board.
What’s a mood board? A mood board (or inspiration board) is a physical or digital collage of ideas that serve as a foundation to the graphic design of your website.
A mood board matches brand qualities to visual content and helps clarify your creative vision.
Use Pinterest
Pinterest is a free, easy tool for creating and sharing a mood board, but use any tool you’re comfortable with. Some people like Canva or Photoshop.
You might want to check with your photographer as well. She might have a tool she likes to use with her clients.
Start just by searching for terms within Pinterest like ‘Modern Website Design’ but don’t limit yourself JUST to web design; pin anything that you like visually that aligns to the feeling you want your website to evoke.
Don’t hesitate to pin interiors, fonts, food and places. It’s also a good idea to look for images in industries different than your own. Don’t overthink it, just pin things that feel like they align to the feeling you want your business and website to evoke.
Make sure to search for terms like ‘photoshoot’ or ‘branded photoshoot for coaches/photographers/cooks/your business type’. This will give you examples of settings and positions you might want to consider for your photo session.
Start looking for colors and themes and styles that you keep coming back to.
Below is a screen shot of my (very in progress) mood board and gives you an idea of how I like to prepare for a photoshoot. I tend to pin a bunch of things and then edit later.
You can see everything is light and airy. I’m also trying to find shot position and frames that I’d like to include.
3. Select an outfit or outfits for your photoshoot
Think about what you want to wear on the day of your shoot. Some photographers recommend choosing up to 5-6 outfits.
Make sure these are clothes you feel good in. Your clothing also needs to convey the feelings you want your ideal customer to experience when arriving at your website (professional, fun, creative etc.)
If you’re finding yourself attracted to a certain color palette include clothing items or accessories in the same colors.
As a website designer, I love it when I can pull colors out of photographs to use for visual elements like website color backgrounds, fonts or icons. It can really pull your visual brand together.
4. Try out and test your make-up before the shoot
Again, the emphasis here is on feeling comfortable. You want to look like yourself in your website portraits, but you also want to look and feel your best.
Only you can decide what level of make-up feels right. I wear a little more than I normally do, but I don’t hire a professional make-up artist . That’s not to say that you shouldn’t.
I personally don’t want there to be too much of a discrepancy between how I look on my website and my first video call with a client. So I try to keep it pretty down to earth.
What’s important is to look at your makeup in natural light before the photoshoot. The camera picks up a lot, so if you looked caked-on and overdone outside, you might look that way in the photos too.
Your photographer will have extra guidance on this as well.
5. Choose the location or locations of your photoshoot
This is another thing you’ll need to work out with your photographer. Where will the shoot take place? Where you work? Outside? In a location like a cafe? Picking the right, on-brand location is a key consideration when you prepare for a photoshoot.
When I did my first branded shoot, we started in my workspace at home and took several shots in all the places I usually get my work done: At my desk, on the sofa and working on my bed. Then we did a couple outside on the street.
We wanted to go to a cafe but ran out of time. I plan to do a shoot this year in a cafe.
To illustrate my point about a visual brand, selecting a cafe has not been easy. There are some that are really lovely, but not really fitting with my visual brand.
I’m looking for a cafe that is light and airy with lots of white space and punches of bold color. Like all the pictures on this website, that’s my visual style, and it’s very important I stick to it.
6. Work with your web designer and photographer to create a shot list
As a web designer, it really helps if I have a variety of images to work with from a shoot. A typical shot list might be something like this:
4 portraits (2 different outfits), 2 landscape, 2 portrait
2 portraits outdoor
2 close up shots
6 detail shots, landscape and portrait
In order to keep the visual mood consistent across the site, a mix of portraits as well as detail images from the same photoshoot is extremely helpful.
Examples of detail images could be:
Items on a desk
Significant, meaningful or symbolic objects or curios
Blurred or obscured photos of you in action
A plant
An inviting area of your work space
Make sure you get multiple versions of the same shot in both landscape and portrait formats.
You’ll also want to make sure your photographer gets shots with a significant amount of ‘blank space’ to the right or left of the object. The object can be you or an important curio. This allows for placement of readable headlines.
It’s also a good idea to include a mix of portraiture and detail images in the same photographic style to use in your social media and other content.
When I started as a Squarespace website designer, one of the first things I knew I needed to grow my business online was create a strong visual brand.
A big part of a visual brand is beautiful, professional photography. The response to it has always been extremely positive and it’s helped position me and my business as an authority in my niche. It can do the same for you too.
Are you thinking about launching a website?
