Most people picture a photoshoot as the part where someone points a camera and says smile. That’s maybe twenty percent of a half-day session. Fait que here’s what the other eighty percent actually looks like, start to finish, so you know what you’re walking into.
Before you arrive: the part you don’t see
A week out, I’ve already read through your website and your last month of posts. I’m looking for two things: what you actually sell, and what’s visually missing. If your offer is a six-month coaching program but every photo you have is of you on a beach, we have a gap. My shot list comes from that gap, not from a generic template.
I also scout. If we’re shooting somewhere I haven’t worked recently, I go at the exact hour we’ve booked, a few days before, to see where the light lands. Restaurants change their patio furniture, construction shows up, a tree gets cut down. I’d rather find that out on a Tuesday than at the start of your session.
The first twenty minutes: nobody’s photogenic yet
We talk. I shoot a few frames while we talk, mostly to get your shoulders to drop, and almost none of those make the final gallery. That’s on purpose. Dans le fond, everybody needs a warm-up, and pretending otherwise just means the first half hour of images look stiff.
This is also when I go through what you brought. Two or three outfits, ideally. We decide the order based on light, not on preference. Darker outfits first if we’re starting in bright sun, lighter ones later as the light softens.
The middle stretch: directing, not posing
Instead of asking people to pose, I give them something to do. Walk toward me and stop when you feel like it. Read the first line of that email out loud. Tell me about the client who drove you crazy last month. The photos that work are almost always the ones taken half a second after someone finishes talking, when their face settles into something real.
For a half-day, I’m usually working through four or five distinct setups. A working scene, something that shows your hands or your tools. A few clean portraits against a simple background, the ones that’ll end up on LinkedIn. Movement shots, walking, laughing, turning. Environmental frames with a lot of negative space, so you can put text over them later. And detail shots, your desk, your notebook, your product, whatever you actually touch during your day.
The thing I do that surprises people
I shoot vertically and horizontally for almost every setup. It doubles the frames, but it means you’re not stuck cropping a beautiful horizontal image into a bad square three months later. Mettons you’re planning a sales page and an Instagram launch from the same session: you need both, and there’s no cropping your way out of it afterward.
I also shoot deliberately wide on some frames, more space than looks right in the moment. That empty space is where your headline goes.
The last half hour: the safety net
By then, we’ve usually got what we came for, so I use the remaining time on whatever felt best. If you loosened up during the walking shots, we do more walking shots. If one location surprised us, we go back. This is where a lot of favorites come from, because by hour three you’ve forgotten the camera is there.
After: what happens to the files
I go through everything and cut hard. A half-day gives me somewhere around eight hundred to a thousand frames, and you’ll see a fraction of that, because sixty options you love beat four hundred you have to sort through yourself. Then I edit for consistency, so the gallery reads as one shoot instead of five different moods.
You get the gallery with a delivery timeline we agree on before the session, so you’re not refreshing your email wondering.
What you should bring
Your outfits, obviously, but also the things you work with. The notebook you actually use. Your laptop with your actual site open. Your product, your mat, your camera, your beads, whatever it is. Those objects are what make a brand session look like your brand instead of a nice portrait of a person standing outside.
If you’re thinking about a half-day and want to know whether your idea fits in the time, just ask. It’s a short conversation and it usually saves a lot of guessing.
Par Marrie-Eve
