In this article, I want to share why I decided to ask a photographer to shoot a library of personal portraits for me, how much it costs and how I use these images.

Last year I decided to invest in photo shooting with the talented and lovely Swiss photographer Lucas Hauri.

Why I needed new photos

In the past, I never had a library of personal photos I could use that had the key elements I was looking for in them. For this new series of photos, I wanted to highlight:

• The Swiss aspect, with the mix of rural and urban that, is so classical in Switzerland.

• The Service Designer skill with me working with sticky notes

• The books I'm writing.

A few of the photos

Here a few of the photos that Lucas shot:

How I'm using the photos

These new photos are used through my social media and the Swiss Innovation Academy. For example, you'll find the new portrait photo in my profile in the Swiss Innovation Academy community:

You'll also see one of the photos from the Lausanne market under the Swiss flag in the "about me" section that you find in various places on the Swiss Innovation Academy website.

Having a few more thematic photos, like me with a book, allows me to illustrate parts of the website with photos that nobody else has. For example here in a landing page about one of my next books where I explain that I'm writing my next book in the open.

I use also the same portrait photo that I use for my community within each social media platform, for example here on Linkedin:

How much did it cost?

With Lucas, we know each other well, so we had a certain level of efficiency in photo shooting. The plan was for me to get 3-5 photos at the end of the photo shoot, and Lucas was extremely generous by over-delivering.

The photoshoot cost me about 500-600$ (or 574 Swiss francs).

For the quality, the speed, and the fact that I now have a library of branded images I can reuse, I can really say that this is pretty inexpensive.

Thoughts for the future

While I'm writing these few notes, I realise how much value I've got from having a library of portraits. It could be interesting in the future to do another photo shoot like this, not to have portraits but more illustrative photos that I could use in combination with the illustrations from Undraw that I currently use.

Such a library could be made of photos that are a bit more abstract, but that would show well the ideas of imperfect iterations, a human touch over automation, humour over academic tone, etc.

Written on Sunday, 2nd of April 2023, by Daniele Catalanotto