Personal Brand Photography | Thom Langford
When cybersecurity expert and international speaker Thom Langford first booked one of my Brand Photography Days in Bristol, his professional profile was growing and he needed imagery that could keep up with it.
Thom has spent years working at a senior level within the cybersecurity industry, alongside speaking, writing and sharing his expertise with audiences far beyond his day job.
As his speaking engagements grew, so did the number of places his face needed to appear — speaker profiles, conference websites, LinkedIn, press, social media and everything else that comes with becoming increasingly visible within your industry.
So, we needed a really useful collection of professional headshots and personal brand photography that represented the level he was already operating at.
POLISHED, PROFESSIONAL… BUT STILL THOM
For this first shoot, we deliberately kept things fairly understated.
The styling was smarter, the palette more muted and many of the portraits seated and considered. We wanted the images to feel established, credible and authoritative.
Think polished rather than painfully corporate.
Because while Thom has a seriously impressive CV, he also has a great deal of personality — and losing that in favour of looking terribly important would have rather missed the point.
The result was a concise collection of personal brand images that felt confident, credible and professional, while still very much feeling like him.
PROFESSIONAL BRAND PHOTOGRAPHY THAT WORKS HARD
One of the things I think about on every personal branding shoot is how the photographs are actually going to be used. There's little point creating 20 variations of essentially the same headshot.
For Thom, we needed enough variety to work across his professional profile, speaking engagements and marketing — different compositions, expressions and crops, including imagery with space for text where needed.
And those photographs went on to do exactly what we needed them to do. For the next couple of years, they became part of Thom's professional identity as his career and speaking profile continued to grow.
Until eventually, he outgrew them. Not because there was anything wrong with the photographs. Quite the opposite. The person and career they were representing had simply moved on. And that gave us a rather lovely reason to do it all again.
Veentia x
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Thom's photographs were created during one of my Brand Photography Days in Bristol — focused sessions for business owners, senior professionals and entrepreneurs who need a considered collection of professional imagery without necessarily requiring a full brand shoot.