Brand Photography Tips from a Client - Interview with Talya Kosstrin of Progressive Trans4mation

I spoke with Talya Kosstrin, from Progressive Trans4mation, who is a brand photography client of mine. Talya owns an Integrative Health Coaching business based in Orlando, FL. She shares why it was important to her to do a brand photo shoot, how she’s using the photos now and what she’ll change before our next session! I’ve summarized some of our discussion but you can check out the full video interview below! If you are a busy professional and you're interested in Talya's one-on-one health coaching services or if you'd like to have her conduct a Wellness Workshop for your company, you can visit Talya’s website.

What made you decide to do a brand photo session?

Talya was in the process of updating her website and creating new promotional material for her corporate wellness workshops. She wanted more uniform pictures, photos with consistent colors and lighting and photos that matched her brand. And she needed high quality pictures for advertising, rather than the lower quality photos that might be suitable for an Instagram story. She also just wanted to make her life easier and stop putting a lot of energy into taking pictures on her own when that wasn’t within her skill set!

We also talked about how certain industries could use stock images but when you’re a solopreneur or you provide one-on-one services, it’s really important that your marketing materials show YOU in action. Plus think of the added bonus of brand recognition when someone sees your face on social media, on a website, in your brochure and then meets you in person! They’ll immediately connect you to your business.

How have you been using the photos since then?

Talya has used her brand images on different pages of her website. She’s created a campaign for her corporate wellness workshops that includes online and print media. She used the photos in her newest brochure. And she’s been using them on social media to advertise her services in a variety of ways.

What difference has it made for you in your business?

Talya says that it’s made things so much easier! When she sits down to work on her marketing plan, she just goes straight to the folder of images that pertain to that project and she has a batch of images to pull from. Before this photo shoot, she would have to dig through existing images from events, trying to force images to work when she might not have been happy with it. Or she would ask her husband to help her take a new set of images. Let’s just say he is so happy that she did a photo shoot with me and has the images that she needs for now - he gets a break!

Creating new collateral is easier and faster and batch creating social media posts in advance is now possible!

The reason Talya is able to just pull the images she needs for whatever project we’re working on is due to the planning process that we did together. I do this with all of my branding clients to make sure the images are as useful as possible. We talk about the topics you discuss most frequently with your audience and brainstorm how to represent that. We talk about locations and colors and where you’ll be using the images. It’s the most important step of the process and actually one of my favorites! I love digging in and learning about a company. It’s like I get to join their team!

What would you change for your next photo shoot?

Now, I didn’t prompt Talya to say this, but her response to this question was, “I should have listened to you more!” I promise, she said it on her own!

The location you use is extremely important as you want to have good lighting, you want the color of the space to blend with your brand colors and you don’t want distracting details in the background. It’s also extremely important to think about the colors you’re wearing. We picked out the colors that Talya would wear and she did a great job with bringing outfit choices, but we both could have been more firm about the outfits of our models as some had some distracting patterns and colors in the concept of Talya’s branding.

Thank you so much to Talya for spending time with me! If you’d like to hear more, view the full interview below!