Personal brand photography

Planning runs backwards from where the files will live. Before the day, the photographer studies your website and grid, asks what you are launching next, and drafts a shot list: a wide portrait with room for text, tighter portraits for profiles, you at the laptop or the drawing table, you explaining something to a small group, and close-ups of hands, tools and products. Thirty minutes covers one setting in one outfit. In São Paulo that is often a coworking space on Avenida Paulista or a café in Pinheiros; in Rio de Janeiro, a terrace in Botafogo or a cobbled street in Santa Teresa. Each of those is a private business or a residential street, so the owner’s agreement comes first. A second setting or outfit is added as extra time, quoted in writing.

Brazilian law matters more here than with a family shoot, because these pictures are meant to sell. Article 20 of the Código Civil (Lei 10.406/2002) allows a person to stop the commercial use of their image when it was not authorised, so a client, colleague or student who appears recognisably signs an image-use release before any frame goes into an ad. Uses beyond your own site and social channels — paid campaigns, a book cover, packaging for a product someone else sells — are agreed in writing before the shoot, not after.

Light decides the hour. In Salvador, Rio de Janeiro or Fortaleza the first two hours after sunrise and the last two before sunset keep skin even and nobody shiny; in São Paulo a grey sky is an ally, because the diffuse light flatters faces both indoors and out. This is not a headshot session: a headshot is a consistent close portrait for LinkedIn, while personal brand photography is a range of scenes. If you need short vertical video as well, the social content service adds clips.