Photography Helps You Recruit Better

When people consider hiring Melissa Kelly Photography, they usually think marketing, branding, or website photos — content geared towards potential clients. But there’s so much more that quality professional photography can be doing for your business than communicating with clients.

We spent a day at Wehrung's shooting the whole operation — the warehouse, the lumberyard, and the retail store up front. Forklifts, stacked lumber, the yard in action, plus the bright aisles and staff on the retail side. Good mix of gritty and polished, which is exactly what a place like this needs for marketing.

Back in the winter, I got the opportunity to run around Manayunk and capture small businesses for an article they wrote, “Power Couples of Manayunk,” how fun is that?!

A lot goes into preparing for a photoshoot — coordinating schedules, getting the right people in the room, making sure everything reflects your brand. Once the session wraps, the work moves behind the scenes. Here's what that process looks like, and how it's designed to get your images into your hands and ready to use.

Hiring a photographer isn’t just about booking a date and getting a few headshots. The right photographer should help you create images that actually support your brand, strengthen your messaging, and give you content you can use across your website, social, and marketing campaigns.

There’s nothing wrong with stock photos (she says, side-eyeing the multicultural handshake). They’re bright. They’re polished. They’re easy. And they’re usually ridiculous. They’re also completely forgettable. If you’ve ever scrolled a website and felt a serious sense of déjà vu, congrats — you’ve discovered the “copy + paste but make it branding” era of the internet.

We all have the same 24 hours. As a business owner, there (hopefully!) comes a time when your calendar fills up, inquiries keep coming in, and you find yourself wishing you could be in two places at once. As a photographer, often the only way to scale your business is to bring on help. When the amount of work became overwhelming, and I wasn’t able to clone myself, I decided that I needed to build a team I could trust.