Founders and owners
Personal Brand Photographer for Founders and Business Owners
When you founded the company, you are the company — on the site, in the deck, in the press, on every panel you speak on. Kay Choi builds one session that produces all of it: portraits, working frames, environmental shots and the images that carry a headline.
The founder problem
Early on, the business has no track record to point at, so it borrows yours. Investors are underwriting your judgement. Customers are betting that you will still be there in a year. Journalists want a face to put on the story. Every one of those situations asks for a photograph, and almost every founder answers it with the same cropped snapshot from a conference.
The problem compounds because founders need different photographs for each of those audiences and rarely realise it until the request arrives. A press outlet wants a high-resolution vertical with clean margins. A deck wants something with space for text. A homepage wants a wide frame. A podcast wants a square. Panel organisers want it by Friday.
One planned session solves all of them at once, which is far cheaper than solving them individually under deadline for the next two years.
What a founder session actually produces
The image plan is built backwards from where the pictures will be used, not forwards from what looks nice.
- The portrait — the frame that becomes your identity across profiles, bios and directories.
- The wide frame — a homepage or section banner, composed with room for a headline to sit in.
- Working images — you doing the actual thing, which is what breaks up a services page and stops it reading like stock.
- The environment — your studio, showroom, workshop, clinic or office, because the room is evidence.
- The press frame — clean, high resolution, vertical, no clever cropping, ready to send without a conversation.
- Social crops — square and vertical variants that were framed for, rather than cut down afterwards.
If your business is a practice or a firm rather than a personal brand, the same day can also cover the team — see team and corporate headshots.
Founders and owners
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The session
- Starts with
- A personal branding consultation — audience, offer, and where the images go
- Plan
- A shot list mapped to specific pages and specific formats
- Session length
- 1 hour
- Looks
- Multiple outfits and looks, different backgrounds and compositions
- Location
- Your workplace, the Naperville studio, or both in one day
- Included
- Kay's Personal Branding Guide
- You receive
- Every image unedited, plus 10 professionally retouched images
- Turnaround
- Delivered within one week
- Prepared for
- Website, social media, press, marketing and print
- From
- $500 — The Branding Collection
Larger projects — multiple locations, a team, or a full brand library — are quoted on the size and needs of the project.
Questions founders ask
I am not photogenic. Is this going to work?
Almost everybody says this, including people who present on stage for a living. What they usually mean is that they have been photographed without direction. The session is directed continuously — posture, hands, where to look, when to breathe out — and the images go up on screen as it runs, so you can see it working rather than take it on faith.
How long do these images last?
Most founders get a year or more out of one session, which is the reason for shooting several looks and settings at once. The usual triggers for the next one are a rebrand, a new product line, a funding round, a book, or looking meaningfully different.
Can you photograph the product or the space as well?
Yes. Details of the work, the tools and the room are a normal part of a branding day and usually do more for a services page than another portrait would. What is included is agreed in the image plan before the session.
What is the difference between this and a headshot?
A headshot session is 30 minutes and $200, and produces one professionally retouched image. The Branding Collection is an hour from $500 and produces ten, across multiple looks, backgrounds and compositions, prepared for a website, press, marketing and print. Both arrive within a week.
Plan a session
Every image your company needs of you, in one day.
The Branding Collection starts at $500 and begins with a consultation about who you are trying to convince.