What to Do When Standard Brand Photography Advice Doesn’t Fit You

Most brand photography advice assumes a fairly standard set of circumstances. Show your face. Let your expression do the work. Make sure people can see you properly.

It’s not bad advice. It just doesn’t fit everyone.

Some women come to me knowing that the usual rules aren’t going to apply to them – and wondering whether that means brand photography isn’t really for them either. It isn’t. It just means the planning needs to work harder.

When a new client came to me recently, she was straightforward about the challenge from the start.

She wears a full veil. She had a new website going live. And she needed people who landed on that website to understand immediately who they were dealing with – her warmth, her experience, her personality – and to know within a few seconds whether they wanted to work with her.

She didn’t say any of this apologetically. She said it practically, the way someone does when they’ve already thought it through and just needs the person in front of them to think it through properly too.

So that’s what we did.

The assumption we needed to address first

There’s an honest conversation to have when it comes to brand photography for Muslim women who wear the niqab or full veil, and I’d rather have it openly than dance around it.

When you can only see someone’s eyes, the assumption is that you’re going to lose the expression. The warmth. The thing that makes a photograph feel like a person rather than a placeholder. It’s not an unreasonable concern – it’s just one that needs solving rather than avoiding.

In our planning call, we talked about it directly. What were people actually going to need to feel when they found her online? Not just to see that she existed, but to get a genuine sense of her – who she is, how she works, whether she was the right person for them.

We both arrived at the same answer fairly quickly.

They needed to hear her.

Why video changed everything

My client is a business coach with nearly twenty years of experience. She’s serious about her work and completely at ease with people. She’s funny. She has a presence that fills a room. And absolutely none of that was going to come through in a still image alone.

This is where thinking beyond the standard brand photography brief matters. Photos were still going to be an important part of the day – she needed portraits, lifestyle shots, images for her website and social media that showed her in her space, doing her work. But we planned from the start that video was going to carry a weight that photography couldn’t on its own.

Talking-to-camera videos where people could hear her voice, her tone, her way of explaining things. Where the personality that a photograph might struggle to capture could just – be there, obviously and immediately.

The still images would show her. The video would let people meet her.

What this means for brand photography for Muslim women

The solution we landed on isn’t actually specific to her. It’s just good planning.

Every client I work with has something that could be seen as a complication – the person who hates having their photo taken, the woman who’s convinced the camera doesn’t like her, the business owner whose work is hard to represent visually. The job is never to ignore those things. It’s to think around them properly before anyone steps in front of a camera.

Brand photography for Muslim women who wear the veil or niqab isn’t a niche problem with a workaround. It’s a planning question like any other. What does this person need people to feel? What’s the best combination of formats to make that happen? What needs to be true about the day for her to leave with assets that actually represent her?

In this case, the answer was a shoot day built around both photos and video – with the video doing the work that a photograph alone couldn’t.

The wider point

Visibility doesn’t look the same for everyone.

That’s not a problem to manage. It’s just the reality of working with real people who have real lives, real beliefs, and real ways of presenting themselves to the world.

My job is to work out what visibility looks like for you – and then build a shoot day around that. Not to hand you a formula and hope it fits.

If you’re thinking about brand photography and you’re not sure how it would work for you specifically, that’s exactly the conversation I’d rather have before the shoot than leave to chance on the day.

If you’d like to talk through what a shoot day could look like for you, you can find details of my packages [here] or get in touch directly [here].