How To Ensure Quality Brand Photography
Your brand is more than just a logo—it's a story waiting to be told through every snapshot!
Brand photography is the representation of your brand— its personality, drive, mission, and achievement— all through the lens of, well, a lens! So, capturing the essence of your brand in a still image is an essential element to the practice of good brand photography. In this post, we’ll cover how to identify your brand identity, how to fine-tune photography guidelines, and how to achieve good brand photography.
Defining Brand Personality
When thinking of your brand identity, there are many elements that go into finding how to best represent your brand through imagery. Each element is unique but essential, as they all work to maintain cohesion and consistency throughout communication and media. Thus, your brand must focus in on two main items: 1. identifying core values and 2. using the right visual language.
The first part of good photography is aligning your camera lens with the things that truly matter to your brand. Many times, these items, values, and tenets can be found within a brand’s mission and vision statements. These one or two sentence pieces of information go a long way in shaping the visual communication of a brand. For example, an eco-friendly brand that promotes positivity and global citizenship may use imagery that hinges on natural, bright light in outdoor settings. Adversely, if they use images of working smoke-stacks and polluted-waters, their message gets out but without their intended attitude of positivity.
Once your core values are identified, maintaining the correct visual language for your brand is key in continuing to take relevant, connective, and cohesive pictures. Not only this, but consistency in imagery increases brand recognition by up to 80%. The simplest way to do this is to gather inspiration for color, style, and themes from other sources like Pinterest and Unsplash. These photo banks are free to use and house millions of images that have the potential to speak to your brand! In practice, you can find a group of images, evaluate each image and how it represents your brand, and create a list of adjectives that assimilate the visual identity you most closely associate with. For example, the eco-brand from before may have a visual language list that looks something like this: “bright, airy, flush, green, yellow, blue, happy, peaceful.”
Choose The Right Style
The style of photography has a lot to do with the consistency of information being shared by your brand. What is “photography style”, you ask? It describes the type of images being taken and the way in which they are captured, and there’s more than just one. In fact, there are over 15 different styles of photography, but the most relevant are brand, product (or commercial), behind-the-scenes, and lifestyle.
Brand Photography: The collection of images that is used to represent your brand and make a connection with your consumers. It can include team headshots, social media and blog post images, and anything you may use in print or digital media that speak to your brand’s identity.
Commercial Photography: Any image that showcases the offering of your brand or business. This is your product photography or images of your services that show off its features and entices people to buy/convert.
Behind-the-scenes Photography: Any image taken during the operation of your business that showcases the process and completion of a task, product, or service. This is used to highlight a brand’s unique style, quality, function, or the like.
Lifestyle Photography: Photos taken to capture the moment of a milestone, activity, or event. These often include candid photos and those where the subjects are not facing/looking towards the camera. These evoke emotion and give a sense of relation to the subjects of the image.
Each of these styles serves a different purpose. They shape the emotion, message, and value your brand seeks to communicate to its consumers. This is crucial when comparing the data that the majority of consumers make purchases following an emotional response and are more likely to have a higher customer lifetime value when they feel emotionally connected to a brand. Now, many brands use all four styles. But there is power and purpose in staying concise. Keeping a decent, consistent mixture of styles goes a long way in shaping your brand’s visual identity. Think about the value your brand offers, the emotions your brand would feel, and how they would speak with the external world. Then, find what style best conforms to these ideas. For example, if your brand aims to be fun and nostalgic, lifestyle photography may be the best first choice for you.
Where To Go From Here
Think you’re ready to identify your visual identity? Go for it! Draw up some inspiration, identify your key words, and evaluate your brand’s style. If you need help, you can browse our Brand Guideline or Photography Guideline templates. If you’d like one-on-one assistance, our FullWell team would love to work with you. Now to start visualizing!
