My style of work focuses on telling an untold story, usually behind the scenes and taking a natural approach to my photography work. I work with outdoor and lifestyle brands as a photographer and social media strategist. Alongside this, I also create content, usually modelling myself, to give brands engaging lifestyle imagery to bring their products and brands to life.
Why not use a model? Sometimes I do but I think it depends on the brief. Especially starting out or just trying to create some content for social media, I think the best thing to do is take a product, head to a location and play around with creating engaging photographs yourself!
I think working solo brings out another element of creativity and makes you think about how you are going to create a series of images on your own, whilst still making them appear professional. There are a few factors to consider, the main one being that I always factor in whether I would be suitable for the brand. I always try to approach brands that I would wear myself or I feel comfortable modelling. This way your photographs will have more natural results.
Here is a recent example of a series of product lifestyle photographs I shot with Hunter Boots. I live in wellies. I have tried so many different boots but nothing has compared to my Hunter Fields. Winter or Summer, walking in these boots has been comfortable and practical. I wear my Hunter Boots on photography shoots, exploring, walking the Dorset countryside and even shopping! Unlike other wellingtons that feel like an effort to spend long periods of time in, my Hunter Fields have been the ultimate walking boot! So I chose this product to work with…
I took some time to head to one of my favourite walking locations in Dorset with my pair of Hunter boots, my Canon 5d mk iV, a film light (because the light was quite flat), tripod, remote trigger and my dog and Landrover Defender (the props!). I had some idea of composition and what I wanted to achieve from the shoot but the majority of my inspiration came from the environment and just exploring the area. It is quite a workout shooting and modelling all by yourself, although I use a remote, I like to refer back to the preview to check the composition and how it looks. If you do this, remember to mark the spot you took your first shot! Throughout every series I do, my message is alway to ‘highlight an untold story’ so I include a range of angles that highlight different aspects of the product I’m focusing on. This includes close up product details as well as details within the landscape. You want to show the whole surroundings to give your audience a sense of the environment.
I styled this shoot with Hunter Boots based on the environment. Neutral and beige made a nice colour palette for this series and I thought about the colours and tones and how this would appear on my feed. My outfit choice didn’t really need too much thinking about but I choose something that was a little quirky, a bit of me and also a little relevant to Hunters brand image.
Once you start building up these shoots and a bank of content / your portfolio, you can then think about how you are going to use them. Whether you are creating content to build up your social media presence, adding to your website content or turning your shoot experience into a blog post. Here are a few ideas of some of the ways I’ve been reusing content recently that I have found has increased engagement and kept my clients brands still active and in the forefront of their audience and followers mind when scrolling through social media.
Reusing photographs to create new blog posts - even though you may have used these photographs in a previous blog post, use them again with a new meaning.
Reach out to your customers, connections, fans for reviews and testimonials - each review can create a new post
Get your blog posts on air as podcasts - podcasting has gotten pretty big lately. If you have a detailed blog post in your achieve, pull them out and dust them off. With a little reformatting, editing and scripting, they make excellent podcasts.
Tagging the right people - Reposting what others have shared from your feed you still remain forefront of peoples mind and active online.
Collaborating with influencers and like minded content creators could also be a low budget option if you are looking for fresh new content. I offer this content creation service to outdoor and lifestyle brands and it is something I love doing. Check out examples of all of my content creation and solo photography projects here