We recently worked with Karzan Hughes, who is a personal trainer and coach for Equestrians from all over the world. He delivers complete health and life coaching to athletes in the equestrian world, championing body positivity, holistic health and the concept of becoming fit for life.

He needed some professionally shot photographs for use in a variety of ways, so we spent some time before the shoot brainstorming ideas, building a shoot list of all of the exercises. Doing this would then mean we could maximise the actual shoot time by working through the list, pausing only to tweak the lighting set-up to ensure we capture Karzan in his best possible light, giving our client complete value for the investment.

We agreed upon a light grey backdrop, which would give the images a light, airy and classic feel, and we kept this backdrop throughout. Because the backdrop was a light colour, there was some extensive retouching required on the floor to get rid of dirt marks, but we fully anticipated this and managed the work accordingly.

The first half of the shoot required us to capture some studio photos of Karzan performing a variety of different exercises that his clients could perform at home. These images are to be added to his professional PDF guide that will be seen by clients the world over. There were plenty of variations, which gave Karzan plenty of material he could use in his literature. As an added bonus, these can also be used on his social media and marketing.

The second half of the shoot, we switched the focus to Karzan’s personal brand material. This content would be shared to his social media platforms, to give his 65k+ following a new and fresh set of content to engage with. He brought plenty of props from his industry along, as well as some changes of clothes, that would drive the message that he was embedded in the equestrian world.

Because of the neutral and plain backdrops, we were torn over whether to bring additional props into the background to give the images a homely feel, and we did some experimentation with bringing some white into the bottom half of the set, but in the end, we got what you see here. We were happy with our work, and Karzan was delighted enough to send us a message stating so.

“Thank you so much. I’ve finally had some time to go through them, and I’m completely blown away. The pictures are incredible!” – Karzan Hughes