BBE were rebuilding their brand from scratch, and the website was where

it all had to land. The brief they handed me was clear on one thing above

everything else: they did not want photography that looked like photography.

No staged shots, no one holding a lanyard and smiling at a presenter. They

were building something that was supposed to feel real, and the images had

to do the same job.

The specific brief covered their live events and programmes, the full-day

sessions where entrepreneurs sit together and work through the kind of

problems they cannot solve alone. Those rooms have a particular energy.

People are uncomfortable and engaged at the same time, which is not a

thing you see very often in a professional context. BBE wanted that on

the website. They wanted someone landing on a programme page to look at

the photography and recognise the feeling, even if they had never been

in a room like that before.

I spent three months with the team, assisting with content capturing,

social media management, and a full website overview to ensure the brand

vision was executed consistently across every digital touchpoint.

The end application was the new website throughout: hero sections,

programme pages, the about section. Images that would answer the question

"is this worth my time?" before anyone had read a word of copy.

Learning the Atmosphere

I spent three months embedded in their events rather than dropping in for

a single shoot, and that time made a real difference to what I came back

with. The first time you walk into a room like that with a camera, you are

still figuring out how it works. You are watching the presenter, following

the obvious moments, shooting the front of the room. By the third or fourth

session, you know where to stand before anything happens.

The image that ended up driving most of the website's visual direction

came from a moment I would not have been in position to catch on day one.

A woman in the audience with her hand raised, a room full of people behind

her, the energy of the whole session visible in a single frame. That is

not something you set up. You have to already be in the right place when

it happens.

The visual approach I settled on was deliberately dark. BBE were moving

toward a black and gold identity, and I wanted the photography to sit

inside that palette rather than fight it. I underexposed the rooms slightly

and let the light fall on faces rather than backgrounds. The result was

images that felt weighted and specific rather than bright and generic.

They looked like they belonged to the brand that was being built, not the

one that existed before.

The social media problem

About three weeks in, it became obvious that the social media was not

keeping up with the rest of the rebrand. The website direction and the

content going out on Instagram looked like two different companies. The

old visual language - repetitive weekly quotes - was still running on the

feed while the new identity was taking shape everywhere else. It was not

anyone's fault, but it needed a complete design shift.

I redesigned the social output to move away from text-heavy posts toward

a video-focused, graphically pleasing feed. Consistent use of the new

colour palette, a tighter image edit, and a content approach that felt

less like announcements and more like something you would actually stop

on. The photography and video I was already capturing gave us a library

to work from immediately. By the end of the three months, the feed and

the website looked like they came from the same place.

Where it ended up

The photography went across the new website from top to bottom. Hero

sections, programme pages, the about section, anywhere a prospective

client might land and need a reason to stay. The brief had asked for

images that made someone feel the room rather than just see it, and I

think the ones that worked best do exactly that. The hand-raised shot

in particular says more about what happens at a BBE event than any

headline could. She is not posing. It was said, That was the whole brief in

one frame.