Personal branding photography isn’t as simple as just taking a headshot photo and an image of you sitting at a table with your laptop and a cup of coffee. Your “visual identity” is much more than that!

Personal branding photography is about intentionally capturing and effectively conveying the distinctive characteristics of your product or service, showing your (and your team’s) unique personality, and sharing the behind-the-scenes process that you work so hard on to ultimately help your clients. Before the camera takes any pictures, there are hours of thought, discussion, and strategizing that take place to plan what kinds of images would work best for your needs.

Rachelle is a singer-songwriter who writes insightful and intelligent songs that lead to both an intellectual and emotional response. To showcase her brand, the images had to look warm, inviting, and intimate (not cold, distant, or disconnected) while being honest and authentic (not overly posed or choreographed). Her next album of all-original songs is themed around perseverance and transformation, so we also wanted to capture her creative songwriting process and show her musical versatility. You can listen to Rachelle’s music on Spotify and YouTube.

Together, we captured a wide range of images that could be used for her website (such as big wide landscape “hero images”) and for Instagram Stories as well (tall vertical portraits). As any graphic designer knows, it’s always better to have more negative space available to work with in the images for potential elements or text to be inserted, so you’ll see lots of functional and practical space here.

If you only have time to listen to one song, “How to Live” is one of my favourites:

“I learned how to win, but not how to lose,
I learned how to think, but not how to choose,
I learned how to blame, but not how to fix,
Oh it’s about time I learned how to live.

I learned how to hide, but not how to seek,
I learned how to fight, but not when I’m weak,
I learned how to take, but not how to give,
So it’s about time I learned how to live.”