Keep It All in Perspective:
A Personal Brand Photography Case Study
AT A GLANCE
CLIENT: Kelsey Barba Radovich, All In Perspective | FOCUS: Personal brand + editorial photography | LOCATION: Downtown San Luis Obispo, CA | ENGAGEMENT: November 2024
"Keep it All in Perspective." A personal brand photography case study
The Situation
Kelsey came to me with over ten years in personal injury law behind her, working her way up from paralegal to senior paralegal to pre-litigation manager, with the kind of post-incident-claims knowledge that only comes from actually living inside the process, start to finish. On the side, she'd built All In Perspective, her own mobile notary practice, meeting Central Coast clients wherever they were instead of asking them to come to her.
Two different audiences, two different needs: personal injury attorneys who needed a paralegal they could hand overflow work to and trust completely, and notary clients, often people who couldn't travel because of time or physical limitations, and needed someone to come to them. Her brand had to speak to both at once, and it had to do it without feeling like two separate businesses stitched together.
But nearly a year into running the business, Kelsey had no visual presence to speak of; nothing that told either audience who she was before they met her. She came to me specifically to promote the mobile notary side of the business, and by the time we shot together at the end of 2024, she was starting from zero: no professional photos, no consistent look with her personal brand at all. Nothing online that made her memorable or trustworthy at a glance. A business built on people trusting a stranger enough to hand over their documents can't run on invisibility.
The Strategic Decision
Before the camera came out, we built her out from the ground up: straightforward, direct, approachable as her top characteristics; sincerity, quality, and knowledge as her core values. She needed to read as personable and high-energy — a self-driven go-getter who's also, when the work calls for it, a rational thinker who can sit with a stack of notary papers and get it right. And she needed to read as classic and established, not brand-new, but someone an attorney would trust with a caseload, not just a notary stamp.
Her brand promise gave us the whole shoot in one line: Life happens; keep it all in perspective. Everything after that was about finding the settings that would let her demonstrate that promise instead of just stating it; mobile and accessible in one setting, deep-focus and capable in another, credible and established in a third.
SERVICES —
- Brand Strategy
- Personal Brand Photography
- Editorial photography
Kelsey's brand was never about choosing between warm and credible; it was about proving she could be both, in the same afternoon, in three different settings. That's the kind of range a single headshot can never show.
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The Shoot
We shot across three locations in one afternoon, each one built to carry a different piece of her brand:
By the car — captured the mobile, accessible side of her notary work: a headshot, Kelsey standing by the car with papers in hand, on the phone with a client, a perspective shot from inside the car. This is the "I come to you" half of her business, made visible.
Kreuzberg's Cafe, downtown SLO — the working-paralegal side: a headshot, Kelsey at the computer, a close-up on a notary signing in progress, and a "thinker" pose that shows the deep-focus, get-it-right side of the job clients are actually paying for.
Downtown SLO, brick walls and the courthouse steps — the credibility side: a headshot, Kelsey walking downtown with her computer and briefcase, on the courthouse steps, and in front of a wall of law books. Brick, architecture, and books do a lot of quiet work here — they say "established" without a single word of copy.
Since the shoot
Kelsey's since gotten married; she now goes by Kelsey Barba Radovich, and she's continued building on the exact foundation this shoot was built around: alongside her mobile notary work, she's taken on litigation paralegal work, a natural next step from the pre-litigation manager experience she already had going into this project. The brand promise hasn't changed. Life happens; keep it all in perspective reads just as true for someone managing litigation files as it did for someone managing a notary schedule.
Takeaway
Kelsey's brand was never about choosing between warm and credible; it was about proving she could be both, in the same afternoon, in three different settings. That's the kind of range a single headshot can never show.
