Brand Photos, Part Three: The Photos Are Here

The photos came back this week. I was expecting to be anxious about looking at them, and I was.

I'll get to how they turned out and where I'm using them. But before any of that, I want to talk about the moment right before I opened the gallery — when I was bracing myself.

I knew what the shoot had been like. I remembered the things I wasn't thrilled about on the day — the humidity, my hair not doing what I wanted, the small things you notice when you're the one being photographed. I knew those things were going to be the first things I saw if I wasn't careful.

So I gave myself a second. Took a breath. Reminded myself what the photos were for. They weren't for me to critique. They were for my business — for my website, my social media, the marketing materials I'd been waiting on. They needed to communicate something specific about my work, and that was the standard to judge them against. Not how my hair looked on a humid morning.

That recalibration made all the difference. When I actually looked at them, I could see them clearly. They came out really good.

A note worth sharing

If you're ever in this position — looking at photos of yourself, or looking at a website that has your face and your words on it, or reviewing any piece of brand work that puts you out there — take that breath first. It's hard to look at things meant to represent you and not pick yourself apart. Most people do it instinctively.

The point isn't to ignore what you see. It's to remember what the work is actually for. A brand photo is a tool meant to communicate something specific about your business. Same with a website. Same with your bio. Same with anything that puts your work into the world. The right question is whether it portrays who you are, what your business is, and whether a potential patient would feel welcomed by it. Not whether it matches some standard of perfection you've built in your head.

That's true for how you look at your own face in a photo, and it's true for how providers look at their own websites for the first time. The instinct is to judge against an ideal that doesn't exist. The more useful question is whether the work is doing the job it needs to do.

Looking at brand work through the lens of "is this doing the job it needs to do" is a very different thing than looking at it through "are there flaws I can find." The first question is the right one. The second one will keep you stuck forever, because there will always be flaws if you look hard enough.

What I have now

I have a range of photos that all share a consistent visual style and color palette. They look like they belong together because they were planned and shot to look like they belong together. That's different from what I was working with before — a few professional photos from other contexts, some stock images that fit my brand colors okay, and design icons I'd made to fill the gaps.

Everything can now look intentional. The site doesn't have to lean on icons and stock photography to cover for the absence of real, brand-aligned images. I'll still use icons where they make sense, but I can drastically reduce the stock image use.

What I'm doing with them

The plan is to start using the new photos on my site right away. My own site is always more of a gradual work in progress than a clean before-and-after, so I'll be working the photos in over time rather than launching a single big update. Once I've had time to live with the new look, I'll decide whether anything bigger needs to change.

I'm also using the photos on social media, which I'm finally re-launching after a long pause. That part is overdue.

A note for providers thinking about this for themselves

If you're considering working with me on your brand, website, or print and digital collateral, the order matters more than people realize when photos are also part of the picture.

The right sequence is generally: figure out your brand and messaging first, then get photos taken that reflect that work, then design the website and other materials around what you have. If you build a website first and then get photos done later, you're trying to retrofit images into a design that wasn't planned with them in mind. Either the site was built around the old photos you had and your new ones look really different, or it was built around the absence of photos and there's nowhere obvious to put them. Either way, the site will be better overall if it's created with the photos in mind from the start.

Photography isn't a regular part of what I offer — I do photos for a couple of ongoing clients, but most projects involve referring you to a photographer if you need one. If you're local to me, I'm happy to point you toward someone. The work we'd do together is everything else — the brand, the site, the materials that all need to share a visual language with the photos you end up with.

Where this leaves the series

Part one was about why I'd put this off for years. Part two was about how much prep the shoot actually required, and why it was worth it anyway. This part is about what I have now, and what it's like to use it.

If you've been putting off your own website, branding, or other parts of your business that need to communicate who you are — you don't need a complicated reason to finally do something about it. You just need to be willing to stop waiting. There's real work involved, but it's worth it. The hardest part is often just deciding to begin.

If you want help thinking through what working together could look like for your own practice, here's where to start.