Deciding who you are in public. Then deciding how to photograph it.

Together we work out who you are at your best - your people, what you believe, how you speak, what you won't do, what someone should feel walking in and what they'd say about you to a friend the next day. We work through your point of view together, and it comes back as a written direction: short, specific, and made to make the work that comes after easier and better

What comes out is what every later decision answers to. The pictures first. Then the site, the menus, the room you haven't built yet, the next person you hire.

A curated set of eight to twelve images.

Curating is most of the work, and it's what decides whether the pictures are still useful in three years.

Most people who commission this don't do it often. A restaurant, a workshop, a hotel photographs itself properly once every few years and then lives on that set. So the job isn't to produce as much as possible in a day. It's to come back with a small number of pictures that are true about the place and hold up after the menu, the season and half the staff have changed.

They're chosen to work apart and together. In practice they get scattered - one on the homepage, three in a deck, one printed large by the door, one sent to a magazine that asked for something today. Each has to carry on its own. They're picked as a group as well, so the site, the press image and the wall at the entrance read as one place rather than three.

A sequence is built around one question the pictures try to answer. It's written down before the shoot and it goes in the brief-back, so you know what I'm looking for and can tell me if it's the wrong question.

A broad set, usually forty to a hundred images.

A relaunch. A new site. A hotel with rooms and seasons to cover. A year of material to draw on. The problem here isn't choosing - it's having something for every page, every format and every month, so nobody ends up filling a gap with a phone picture or something licensed from a stock site. That mixture is what makes an otherwise good site look uneven, and it usually happens six months after the photography, not during it.

Priced and licensed differently, since it's made for volume and you'll be using it for years.

A single portrait. A piece made over several visits. A book. A year photographed in four parts. When the work wants its own shape, we write down what it is before anyone talks about money - what it covers, how many images, what it's for.

If you're not sure which one you need, tell me what the pictures are for and I'll tell you what I think. Sometimes the answer is Direction first.