Salford Quays Branding Photography

And so I am chatting with Dayo, squeezing out Janet’s teabag, and he’s seen me around in the building with my client and the camera. He is intrigued to what I am doing and why? So I casually describe to him that I make photos for established business executives who want to make impact online. That I make a whole series of interchangeable and varied, styled photographs that they can use regularly to accompany any kind of post, article, webinar, event, rinse and repeat them. That professional photos make 3 x the impact of written text. That clients always see images subconsciously before text. Photos that are made at an elevated level with all the right visual messages to attract the right clients.  Dayo asks what they look like? By pure chance there’s lifestyle office photo on the kitchen wall, a guy working on a laptop smiling into the camera.

‘I make photos like that’, I say, as I don’t have my phone with me to show him my own work and portfolio.

“Can you do this for me?’, he asks me. ‘Of course I can ! And I do. We swap details and I go back to my client and continue our shoot after her reviving cuppa.

I really love shooting around Salford Quays, Manchester, Leeds and the North. I love the people I meet, their directness of speech and warmth of hospitality. And I love that I can make a cup of tea in a kitchen and randomly find a new client, who decides he likes me and pretty much commissions me there and then, from just a few shared words . We do talk some more and I am back the next week to shoot for him this time.

Dayo is a director of a construction company and also has launched a coaching business. His photos ideally should serve both businesses and we make them that way. We shoot office style working shots with Mickie and Rob, his co-directors. I ask them to go ahead, have their  meeting. As they chat I shoot them, the same documentary photography process as if I was shooting a wedding. This kind of process works really well for relaxing clients and allowing me to capture something really natural as they start to forget me, relax and discuss real life issues.

Mickie & Rob have a few photos outside for added variety and then Dayo has a clothing change and we take images that support him as a construction director and then some a little less formal. His body language is far softer and much more open and relaxed to suit his coaching business whereas with the construction shots, the body postures are far more reserved and formal.