Small Business Brand Photography: The Impact of Lighting and Color
The way your photos look, including the lighting and colors used, has a great impact on consumers. This is why it is so important for small business owners to pay close attention to color and lighting when designing their corporate identity and branding strategy. Maintaining a consistent look and feel and identity helps strengthen your brand by improving its appearance, building consistency and trust, and more.
Lighting & Color
Light and color have a strong influence on people. Colors, for example, have meanings that can play a role in how a company is perceived. Small businesses that one day want to expand into other countries or cater to specific demographics should think about how colors can be perceived regarding that specific audience. For example, in China, red is a very lucky color. Especially in the US, red can mean strength or courage, but it can also be associated with danger.
Once the colors are chosen for the brand, the next step is to think about the lighting of the photos. Lighting creates mood, meaning that balanced lighting can produce highly visible photos or professional-looking images, while poorly lit images can appear dim or gloomy. When choosing lighting, companies need to think about the mood they want to create and decide whether they want the image to be bright and cheerful, dark and mysterious, or something else altogether.
Creating a Consistent Visual Identity
After selecting brand colors and lighting choices, small business owners need to focus on creating a coherent visual identity.
Creating a coherent visual identity is easy. Once a brand has chosen colors, those colors should be used in all marketing materials. To ensure consistency, the brand needs to know specific hexadecimal color codes.
Brands need to define whether they are professional, fun, lighthearted, serious, or have some other approach to business. Therefore, this feeling should be present in all your marketing materials.
Brand Perception
Color helps a brand to stand out and define its image. Lighting, on the other hand, helps create a brand feel.
Ambient lighting, for example, can ensure uniform illumination of almost any space. This lighting is perfect for product photography, for example, as it clearly highlights the goods.
Significantly different to ambient lighting is colored neon lighting or darker mood lighting. To choose the right option for a brand, they need to determine the mood they want to create. For credibility and direct sales, clear and bright images may be best. However, there are always exceptions worth discussing with a business lifestyle photographer.
Building Strong Brands with Light and Color
Small businesses are well placed to build a strong brand from the ground up. The key is to first create a visual identity that represents your business well. Choosing the right colors and lighting options is only part of the process, but they are one of the keys to reaching and engaging your audience and building a professional and trusted brand.
Author bio: Jonathan Young of Jonathan Young Photography is a Los Angeles-based commercial photographer who creates clean and inviting images of people, food, and products that help to position them at the top of their genres.