Hi, I’m Valent! I love photography, but I love transforming people more. Nothing is better than having a client change from “I’m not good at photos” to “I never thought I could look this good!”
Photography is there to win you business. Have you seen websites filled with fake stock photos, or “professional” headshots that have a blank expression that says nothing? What a lost opportunity!
We help you connect with your clients through your photography, so they feel a trust and confidence in what you say. That way, they’re more likely to contact you first!
It’s our ability to discover your qualities, to draw out your natural personality, that makes our business portraits so valuable. Unlike other photographers, you’ll never see us photographing products, food, or architecture. We specialise in people, so that we can help you to feel comfortable, confident and be at your very best.
Our business portrait sessions are a relaxing experience that suits even the most camera shy. Read more about The Experience.
We’ve photographed for many including:
My Story
I hated photos when I was young. Dad at family events was always “everyone line up and say cheese”. Then we would be holding a smile for like 10 seconds and he still hadn’t taken the photo. It was painful. So painful.
I went to a boarding high school. There spending idle hours in the library that I became infatuated with the land and starscapes, nature and animals in magazines such as National Geographic.
Still, it wasn’t until uni that I got my first camera. I was going to Japan, my first ever trip alone! I read all I could about photography and bought a little automatic camera. I visited Japan for 3 weeks and came back with 46 rolls of film! The photo lab in Japan knew me by name.
I loved holding the prints and putting them into albums. My family would say how my shots looked like a postcard. They meant it as a compliment, but it left me feeling something was missing. It was picture perfect, but there was no soul in the shots, nothing that connected. In today’s world it would be a photo you pressed like then scrolled past. What was missing was the human element, though I wouldn’t understand that for a while to come.
The big cameras
Later the woman who would later become my wife introduced me to the DSLR. I fell in love with photography all over again. We spent hours at flower shows, hiked mountains to find scenes, studied equipment.
I started shooting freelance for a local magazine, doing fashion shows, interviews, parades, food and products, everything from articles to advertisements.
The revelation
Finally I stepped into portrait photography. As I captured the connections between people and saw how they reacted, it dawned on me. There was something more to a photograph than its elements. It was the emotions and connection that pulled the viewer in and gave the photograph value. It had the impact to make your potential client pause and take note.
It was relevant even to SMEs. Business owners intertwine their identity with that of their businesses. By capturing that part of their person that made their business unique, we could connect with viewers in a way that all the bragging in the world would not. It would create genuine looking photographs that naturally attracted clients with great fit.
I found that the more I learned about a business person’s industry and market, the more I could create photographs that connected with viewers in a meaningful way. We could create a photograph that conveyed the right levels of trust and confidence. It made clients feel more comfortable with you, and this meant they called you first rather than a competitor. And wasn’t this exactly what you want?
Now Valent Lau Photography exists to help small businesses convey their message authentically and effectively to their market.
