Naturally if you’re read any of my posts on branding, you’ll see that I’m a big believer in the importance of it. It’s a key component to a business and once you realize that for yourself you’ll be much further along. You should always hire a trained designer/agency to develop your brand on the graphical side, but we all know that takes a good chunk of change. A brand development like mine can cost anywhere from $5-10K. There is a whole process behind the development and it’s unique to who you are. Its one of the most important things you can do for your business next to taking pictures. Perception is reality(in the visual branding sense), and that is what people take you for on a first impression. Unless you are a trained designer, you should never do your own brand. If you have that kind of cash to spend on developing your brand that’s awesome, and is a great investment, but you should also have shot for a few years and have a good sense of who you are as a photographer because that plays into your visual brand.

That said, I know how hard it is to come up with that kind of cash to hire a designer to create your brand during the first few years of your business. Trust me, I lived off of peanuts and ramen for the first few years of my photography journey because every penny I had went back into my business. Buying equipment ain’t cheap! That’s where your initial investment should reside because that directly makes you money, and you need to have a product before you can build a brand around it. My friends over at Brand Envy have just come out with a great solution for people starting out without the capital to invest in a custom brand package. It’s called BE by Brand Envy. It’s basically an e-commerce branding package where you can choose your design template, and logotype, etc and have a higher quality execution. The great thing about it is you can have a tight designed brand for a price range of $625-$2000, which is very affordable. It will be hands down better than anything the untrained eye. The drawback is the same as any template driven, you may not be the only one with that design.

Check out BE by Brand Envy’s packages here: http://bit.ly/BEbyBrandEnvy

In all my efforts of analyzing my business, and where I want to be, I came to a new realization. I’ve always preached that you need to show what you WANT to be shooting in your portfolio and I still believe that to be true. What I’ve been thinking about recently is even beyond that we need to be shooting vertically rather than laterally, and by that, I mean that we need to be shooting imagery that our dream clients actually aspire to.  That’s what the advertising/lifestyle/fashion world is all about. We build aspirational imagery for our client’s demographics, why don’t we shoot aspirational work to reach our demographic? (in most cases in the photo world this would be art directors and photo editors). All the people hiring us want to aspire to a high level of creative. If our clients are seeing our work as a vertical reach to what they’re trying to achieve, it gives them more of a desire to hire us than if we shoot what they already do.

I wrote a previous post on “Creating your own branding imagery” which this very much ties into. (along with “Making better images & Showing more people“) Why not create images that are at a higher level than the clients we are wanting to work for?

Aspiration breeds inspiration. Inspiration breeds motivation. So, translated into photography speak, shoot imagery that is aspirational for the demographic you are targeting, and inspire them to want you. To want your creative eye applied to their vision.

It’s funny to see how a magazine can use images to convey their story. This photo of mine that you’ve probably seen before just ran in the September issue of Seventeen magazine and just hit the news stands. The story is on everyone having humiliating moments… not even close to how I saw it when I shot it. The cliché quote "A photo is more than 1000 words" still rings true, and the beauty of it is, everyone can imagine their own story behind a good photograph.

Just read a quote from the War of Art. There will probably be a few of these coming as I read through this book. It’s a great book for any artist.

Steven Pressfield says "When we see others begining to live their authentic selves, it drives us crazy if we have not lived out our own. Individuals who are realized in their own lives almost never criticize others. If they speak at all, it is to offer encouragement."

Such a great realization. Do you find yourself criticizing others? I think it’s part of the artistic journey.

Watch this transformation of an ordinary looking girl transformed into a supermodel. It’s pretty amazing what we do today in advertising. The magic of hair/makeup and photoshop. Our perception of beauty is so fictitious. The video by Ogilvy and Mather, a world renoun advertising agency shows us how our perception of beauty is founded on people who don’t even exist. We as photographers participate in creating this pretend perception. Is it art or deception?