I read a lot of briefs. Most of them tell me what they want photographed and when. Almost none of them tell me what it should look like.
This week I read one that did. A potential client laid out style and art direction with real specificity, not just “professional headshots” or “clean, modern feel,” but actual reference points for tone, framing, and how the images should feel next to their existing brand work. It caught me off guard. That’s not normal.
The gap this exposes
Later that same day, I had a separate conversation about something related: how much marketing content still leans on stock photography. Not because anyone thinks stock is the best option, but because nobody defined what “on brand” actually looks like in photographs. So the gap gets filled with whatever’s fast, cheap, and generic.
Here’s the thing. A company can have a sharp logo, a locked-down color palette, a style guide for its website and its decks, and still have zero standard for what its people and leadership, spaces, or work should look like in a photo. Visual identity stops at the parts that are easy to templatize. Photography gets treated as a one-off purchase instead of a system.
That’s the real problem. It’s not that companies are choosing bad photography over good photography. It’s that most never get asked to choose at all. Nobody hands the photographer a brief that says “this is our look” because nobody wrote that down in the first place.
What a Good Photography Brief Actually Does
The brief I read this morning wasn’t longer or more complicated than a typical one. It just answered a different question. Instead of “what do you need,” it answered “what should this look like when it’s done, and why.” That’s the difference between hiring someone to execute a shot list and hiring someone to protect how your brand actually looks in the world.
When a client can tell me that, the shoot moves faster, the results need less back-and-forth, and what comes out the other side actually looks like them instead of looking like every other company’s LinkedIn photo. Stock imagery doesn’t have that problem because nobody expects it to look like you. Branded photography only works if someone decided, on purpose, what “you” looks like.
Most companies never make that decision. They just default to whatever’s available. And it shows.
The lesson
If your visual identity has a plan for your logo and your colors but no plan for your photography, that’s not a small gap. It’s the part of your brand most people actually see first, and it’s running on autopilot.
What Should a Photography Brand Standard Define?
You don’t need a 40-page brand book to fix this. You need one page that says what your photography should look like, and who it should look like next to.
It should define the basics: how your commercial photography should portray your people, how images should be composed, what the lighting should feel like, and what kinds of environments make sense for your brand. It should also give enough direction that photography created six months from now still feels like it belongs next to what you’re producing today.
The goal isn’t to make every photograph look the same. It’s to make sure they all look like they came from the same company.
Planning photography for an upcoming campaign or brand refresh?
If you’re trying to define what the photography should look like before production starts, let’s talk through the creative direction, usage and shot requirements before shoot day.