Your Business Deserves Better Than Stock Photos
You know that woman smiling at her laptop who somehow works for approximately 47,000 different businesses?
She is BUSY. 😂
Look, there’s nothing wrong with stock photography. It has a purpose, and sometimes it’s exactly what you need. But when your website is supposed to show people who you are, what you do, and what makes your business different, there comes a point when someone else’s photos just can’t tell your story.
A few years ago, I worked with a local business owner who was updating her website and running into exactly that problem. She didn’t just need a new headshot. She needed photographs that actually looked like her business.
So instead of filling those spaces with more stock photography, we created her own.
Your Branding Photos Don't All Have to Be of You
Of course, we started with portraits. People connect with people, and showing the person behind a business is an important part of building trust.
But here's where branding photography gets a lot more interesting. Your business is more than your face.
For this session, we also needed images that could actually show what the company does. This business specializes in electronics recycling, so instead of relying on generic stock photos of phones, laptops and recycling bins, we photographed the real thing.
Phones waiting to be recycled. Devices being placed into recycling boxes. Electronics in different stages of the process. Hands interacting with the products. Even simple images of phones and laptops photographed intentionally for areas of the website where a clean background or room for text was needed.
In other words, we created a stock photo library that belonged to her business.
Sometimes the Most Useful Branding Photo Doesn't Have Your Face in It
When people hear “personal branding photography,” they usually picture portraits — and yes, those are important. But some of the hardest-working images in a branding gallery can be the ones you're not in at all.
Think about the things that make your business your business. The products you sell. The tools you use. Your workspace. The details of your process. The things your customers see when they work with you.
Those are the images that can fill the spaces where you would otherwise reach for stock photography.
And because we're creating them specifically for your business, we can think about where they're going so we know exactly what to create.
Need a wide image for a website banner? I'll leave room for text. Need something vertical for a specific section of the site? We'll photograph for that space. Need a clean image that can work behind a headline? We can create that too.
We're not just making pretty pictures and hoping you find somewhere to use them later.
We're creating photographs with a job to do.
Three Years Later, They're Still Doing Their Job
We created these images in 2023. Three years later, many of them are still being used on the company’s website.
And honestly, that’s exactly what I want from a personal branding session.
Not just a gallery of beautiful photos you love when you first see them, but photographs that have a purpose. Images that fit your website, represent your business, and give you something that’s actually yours instead of another photo pulled from a stock library.
Your business probably doesn’t need more photos.
It needs the right ones.
So if you’re updating your website, launching something new, or realizing the woman smiling at her laptop has worked for your company long enough 😂, let’s create something that actually belongs to your business.