Kay Choi, Personal Branding and Headshot Photographer

It is an unusual combination of experience: healthcare, design, and visual communication. Kay has practised as a hospital pharmacist for fifteen years and still does — inside the corridors, clinics and treatment rooms where a large part of her photography now happens — and she studied visual communication design to a Master's degree.

That matters more than it sounds like it should. A photographer who has never worked in a hospital has to be told what a white coat means, why a stethoscope hangs the way it does, what a clinician's day is like at eleven in the morning, and why a physician cannot be away from a floor for two hours. Kay does not need to be told any of it. She is still on the other side of it.

The design half does the other job. Visual communication design is the discipline of making an image do a defined job for a defined audience — the difference between a photograph that is beautiful and a photograph that works on the page it was made for. It is why every session here starts with what the pictures are for, and who is going to see them, rather than with a camera.

Three things are consistent across every session, whether it is a twenty-minute headshot or a full branding day.

Planning comes before photographing

The session is designed around your goals, your audience and where the images will actually be used. Wardrobe advice, background choices and framing all come out of that, which is why the guidance is specific to you rather than a generic checklist emailed to everyone.

You see the pictures as they happen

Images go up on screen during the session. Clients mention this more than anything else, because it removes the part people dread — handing over control and finding out weeks later. It also means changes get made while there is still time to make them.

Direction, continuously

Almost nobody photographs badly. Most people have simply never been directed. Where to put your weight, what to do with your hands, when to breathe out, where to look a half-second before the frame — a steady stream of small instructions is the difference between looking like yourself and looking like someone being processed.

The largest body of work is healthcare: physicians, dentists, nurses, clinical pharmacists, aesthetic practitioners — photographed in hospitals and clinics as often as in the studio. Alongside that: executives and boards, business owners and founders, consultants and advisers, attorneys, therapists, realtors, politicians, authors, artists and performers.

What they have in common is that their face is doing commercial work. A patient chooses a physician partly on a photograph. A client decides whether to call a firm partly on a photograph. A founder's portrait goes on the site, the deck and the press page and stays there for years.

Sessions run in the Naperville studio or on location at an office, clinic, practice or business — anywhere within about a hundred miles.