Personal brand photoshoot, Honley West Yorkshire

Crafters Cottage, personal brand

Personal brand photoshoots are now the biggest thing since slice bread. In fact, you can’t go two feet without hearing the words personal branding. In fact since Borris has turned the weddings industry inside out every photographer is now a personal brand expert so what is it?

Fifteen years, am I the expert?

So for the last fifteen years I’ve been photographing personal brand shoots for so many businesses, but until recently I’ve never put a name on these and now even I have to jump on the personal brand band wagon. I specialise in photographing people and telling their story as a business and that in a nutshell is exactly what a personal brand shoot is.

Crafters Cottage, Honley, West Yorkshire

I was really excited to go and see Jools at the wonderful Crafters Cottage. This was a shoot for the new Honley website that I’m working on with a great team and my job is to capture each individual business. Walking into Crafters Cottage is a delight, it’s an Aladdin’s cave of bath and body, craft and home decor goodies. I met up with the lovely Jools and as I’m a personal branding expert (hahaha) I could tell by her body language that she was a little nervous to have her photo taken.

slowly slowly catchy monkey

When I can tell someone is a little nervous I want to make them feel good about themselves. I knew that my best approach to get the pictures that I required was to just start taking lots of pictures of all the products in situ. I knew that photographing, soap, candles, gifts and cosmetics would enable me to chat and get to know Jules but still taking pictures (multi-tasking and I’m a bloke). Chatting to Jules I could see that her real passion was in the workshops that she runs, due to a certain Covid, things were on hold but I knew I needed to get Jools creating. She’d mentioned how excited she was about her new soap cutter so that was my in.

Natural portraits

I photographed Jools using her soap cutter, then packaging some soap and just slowly pushed from there. Before I knew it, I had her standing in her shop posing for natural portraits and my job was done. Sometimes I have to have a build up before I get the results that I envision but it’s all the part of the process. Everyone has loads of fun and we always get some fab pictures.

Make sure you head over to Crafters Cottage for some gifts and treat yourself to one of the many workshops on offer.

If you’re looking for a personal brand expert then get in touch with me john@johnsteelphotography.com