Nakia: Creative Headshots and Personal Branding photoshoot

For today’s post, I’m going to share photos from an actor/singer’s headshot photoshoot and discuss how a Personal Branding Photoshoot works across many industries.

I recently had the honor to photograph the multi-talented, Nakia! You may remember Nakia as a contestant on The Voice back in 2011. Since then, Nakia has continued with his music career, releasing music independently as well as acting. Nakia reached out to me last year, as he was looking to get new headshots he could use to audition primarily for acting. After a series of events and some delays, Nakia flew up to NYC this past week to shoot with me. Since it had been a full year since we connected about his headshots, there were some slight changes. Since Nakia is an artist, I knew that I wanted to approach this photoshoot from a branding perspective. The main focus was to create new theatrical and commercial headshots that Nakia could use for auditions, but also create new promotional photos that he could use on social media, his website and of course, to use images to promote his music shows and appearances.

A Personal Branding Photoshoot aka a Branding Shoot truly goes beyond the headshot. I like to approach all Branding Photoshoots as an editorial for my subject. It’s all about telling a story and creating a narrative to showcase. For actors and performers, you would want to capture images that show off their unique character types. You also would want to get images that they could use for promotional material since today’s world is powered by imagery. That’s exactly what I did for Nakia; the story was to show the many sides of Nakia and how he could transform for roles. He could play a Dad, a quirky wedding planner, a brooding character with a mysterious past, a queer villain and the list goes on. We wanted to make the most of our time, so we had a couple of pre-shoot calls to go over details and certain types he could be cast as, outfits, logistics, etc. Nakia gave me artistic control and allowed me to take these creative headshots. I collaborated with Nakia on selecting backdrops and made sure he was involved through every step of the process. It’s so nice when clients trust me to make their images.

I hired on Faye Lauren to do Nakia’s grooming. Since Nakia wanted to shave his face halfway through, I knew that having a Men’s Groomer on set would be helpful. Not only is Faye talented in makeup, she does great with men’s hairstyles, so after Nakia' shaved off his beard, Faye was able to go back in and reset his grooming and give him a different hairstyle to fit his new look.

A Personal Branding Photoshoot is definitely longer than a traditional headshot photoshoot, but it’s certainly worth the extra time that’s put into planning and shooting these images. I think you can see from these photos, that we got quite a range of images for Nakia to work with.

Nakia’s official headshot for acting submissions.

You’ll see here the changes we did for Nakia’s look. We have rocker Nakia + quirky gay Nakia

A Nathan Lane-eqsue Nakia.

And finally, Nakia himself sans beard.

Thank you, Nakia for coming to NYC for your photoshoot with me!! I had a blast working with you and I’m excited to see what happens next for you and your career!

You can follow Nakia online @nakia on all social media platforms and get updates on his music releases at: nakia.net. His next single, “Show It To Me” ft. Big Daddy Karsten is out 7/24/24 on all streaming platforms!

Nakia was sweet and filmed a short post-shoot testimonial sharing his thoughts about his experience working with me. You can check it out below.

A few words from Nakia!

I’m currently booking Personal Branding, Headshot, and Portrait Sessions through the Fall. Get in touch today and we can talk about what kind of images we can create to help elevate your brand!