How To Prepare For Your Spa or Salon’s Beauty and Wellness Photography Session
So you’ve taken the steps to hire a professional photographer to photograph your salon, spa, or other beauty and wellness-based business? Congrats! Now it’s time to prepare for your session so you can make the most of it! By following the suggestions below, your photographer will be able to create stunning images for your use on your website, social media and anywhere else you may post them!
Alert all team members to your photo session date as early in advance to give them a chance to prepare themselves and help create an overall successful photo session. Nobody likes to show up to work and be informed that a photo session is happening that day without their previous knowledge. Your spa or salon’s photo session is a great time for all staff to update their headshots, and they may need some time to prepare for it. Make sure to have all team members come in on photo day, even if they are not scheduled to work. This way you will have fresh images of everyone. Offering your team members their headshots from the session can help create a reason to make it worth their while it to come in. By informing your team members and consulting with them, you can all work together to make photo day successful!
Fill out a model release for yourself, and have one filled in by all your team members and any clients who are going to model for you. Posting images with consent is important, and this simple step will help prevent any issues later when images are posted. Your photographer should be providing you with the necessary model releases as part of your photography package.
Speaking of client models, feel free to bring in any clients who you’d like to model in your photo session. You are welcome to use fellow team members for the “action shots” but bringing in clients who are willing to have their images shared creates more variety on your social media.
Bring a few changes of clothing into work on photo day! This will allow you to get a variety of images as you will want to post more than one of each person. Clients enjoy seeing images of team members and it’s a great idea to put up an image of each team member at least once a month… even more if you are the business owner! So why not get several headshots of yourself done in one session? With several clothing changes, your clients will never know the images were all taken in one day and will just be happy to see you posting yourself more often!
You and your team members (and client models if you have any) will want to pay attention to the details of your personal preparation! Your hair, makeup, and nails will all be visible in many of the photos and you’ll often get close-ups of these details, so you’ll want to be ready! Whatever your line of expertise, make sure you are a good representative of your brand to others. It’s better to have no nail polish at all, than to have chipped nail polish showing up in close-up images of hands.
Clean your windows! Smudges and streaks are never a good look! Make sure you’ve swept the floor and tidied up your space as well. While you are cleaning, make sure to tidy up any areas that may have become messy. Space the products on your shelves exactly as you’d like them to appear in photos. Most spas and salons tend to have clean and tidy spaces, but it never hurts to do a quick double check!
Create a list of topics you plan to cover on social media in advance of your photo session. If you’ve booked a full Beauty and Wellness photo session with me, we will go over that and discuss what specific images we’d like to create together that will go well with the future posts you currently have planned!
I hope these tips help you prepare for your Beauty and Wellness photography session! If you own or manage a spa, salon or any other beauty and wellness-based business in Calgary and area and you’d like to learn more about a photography session for your business, please reach out and I’d love to chat with you and answer any questions you may have!