AI-Powered Photography Business Name and Logo Generator
Looking to start your own photography business?
If so, you’re in luck—read our guide about how to start a 6-figure photography business.
You’ll learn my hard-earned secrets to be your own boss and gain your financial freedom. These lessons come from 8 years of experience running 2 successful photography businesses.
One of the first steps to establishing yourself is building your photography brand.
There are many elements that go into a brand—such as the name, visual identity, tone of voice and values.
In this article, we’ll focus on the process of choosing a photography business name that gives you an unfair advantage over your competition.
What a Name Can Do for Your Photography Business
Coming up with a great company name can feel like trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat, but it’s something that you can do with the right process in place.
But first, you need to understand what a company name can do for you. Here are some possibilities:
- Achieve separation from your competitors
- Reinforce your unique positioning
- Put you at the top of mind of your customers
- Provide a source of images for your marketing and advertising
- Create lasting engagement with your audience
- Rise above the services you provide to embody your brand values
- Dominate your category
If you think the list above sounds far fetched, think again.
When Apple came into the market, their competitors had names like IBM, Commodore, Microsoft, NEC, Kaypro and Dylakor.
Their name alone helped to set them apart from all of their competitors.
Everyone else had names that sounded complicated, like you needed a PhD to even understand what they were doing.
In true “think different” fashion, Apple went in the opposite direction. They went with a name that sounded friendly and accessible, and that aligned perfectly with their vision of making products that anyone can use.
Competitive Analysis and Positioning
Now that you know the power of a name, let’s go through the steps of the naming process.
The first step is analyzing your competition and figuring out your positioning.
You’d want to pay attention to how your competitors are positioning themselves. What are the common names among them? How are they projecting themselves?
Since photography businesses are local services, pay special attention to the competitors in the same area as you.
After you’ve done your competitive analysis, you can then identify opportunities to separate yourself from the pack. Here are some questions you can ask yourself:
- How am I differentiating myself from the competition?
- Do I want to use the same naming convention as everyone else, so that I meet the expectations of my customers? Or do I want a name that immediately makes me stand out from the rest?
- What are my brand values and tone of voice?
For example, many photography businesses name themselves after the owners—for example, John Lee Photography.
It’s a naming strategy that’s safe, because no one is going to get offended by it. It’s also easy to understand, so it’s immediately clear to potential customers what the business does.
On the other hand, because it’s such a common naming convention, following it will make your photography business blend in with everyone else. That makes your business name difficult to recall—was it John Lee Photography or James Lee Photography?
Choosing a name that goes against the convention can help you immediately get attention and put you at the top of mind.
Let’s walk through an example.
Say you name your photography business Honeybear Studio. Regardless of what you think of honey bears, this name will separate you from your competitors and it’s 100% easier to remember.
It’s also a name that sounds friendly and approachable, which is great if that aligns with your personal and brand values.
For example, you might run a portrait studio and you know that many clients find portrait shoots a scary experience.
Having a name like Honeybear Studio will make your business sound way more approachable, and it works if you have the personality to put your clients at ease.
Over time, that becomes your differentiating factor. You provide photo shoots that people actually enjoy and have fun doing.
With this name, you just differentiated yourself from the competition and reinforced your brand values.
The name also provides a rich source of images for your marketing and advertising.
A name like Honeybear Studio allows you to create a mascot to build your whole brand around. Since your differentiating factor is your approachability, you’d want a cute mascot.
Perhaps you can make your mascot a little clumsy, so you show it tripping over a cable or triggering the flash by accident. These are images that you can use across different marketing channels, like your website, ads, brochures and social media.
Suddenly, you find yourself attracting a different segment of clients, for family and pet portraits. And all that started from a unique business name, which led to a unique brand positioning.
The 4 Categories of Names
Generally speaking, there are 4 major categories of names—each with their strengths and weaknesses.
They are:
- Descriptive names
- Invented names
- Experiential names
- Evocative names
Let’s run through each category.
Descriptive Names
Descriptive names explain to the world what business you’re in.
This is a common strategy for photography businesses—think of all the companies with “photography” or “studio” in their names.
Some companies get even more specific, and tell you exactly which photography niche they belong to. For example, they might have “portraits” or “weddings” in their names.
The upside is that it’s immediately clear what you do.
However, there are several downsides to this approach.
Descriptive names can be unnecessarily restrictive, especially if you were too specific about your niche. Let’s say your business name is John Lee Portraits or Jim’s Pet Photography. If you ever plan to branch out to different niches, the name is going to become an issue.
Even if the name is more generic, like John Lee Photography, it’s still a problem if you plan to start offering videography services.
Descriptive names also tend to blend together and fade into the background. They tend to use the same descriptive keywords (like “photography”), which makes companies hard to separate from one another.
A common reason people use descriptive names is because they’re worried that potential customers won’t know what they’re doing otherwise.
But you have to remember that names don’t live in a vacuum. Names are always part of a wider context—like a website, name card or advertisement—which explains what the business does.
Invented Names
Invented names are names that are constructed because of how they sound or look—they’re not actual words in the dictionary.
They can be totally made up, or have roots in other languages like Greek or Latin.
The key is to have a name that sounds poetic or rhythmic.
A famous example in the photography industry is Kodak. It’s a word that was made up by George Eastman, the founder, and is completely meaningless.
He chose it because he wanted a short and catchy name that started with the letter K, which was his favorite.
Other famous examples are Adidas, Kleenex, Google, Snapple and Hägen-Dazs.
Invented names are great because they are obviously unique, being completely made up.
That makes it easy to get a trademark if that matters to you, and also a desirable .com domain.
By design, the target audience also likes saying these names, which can make them more memorable and engaging.
The challenge is that invented names don’t have any inherent meaning, which means that you have to build all of the meaning into the name yourself.
That’s a long-term project and can require significant investment.
Not to mention that it can be really hard to think of an invented name that actually sounds catchy.
Experiential Names
Experiential names speak directly to the experience you’ll have with a company.
It rises above descriptive names, which just talk about what a company does.
Let’s say you’re starting a wedding photography business.
Instead of naming it John Lee Photography, an experiential name can be Love and Adventure.
It implies that the experience of working with you is like an adventure, perhaps because you offer destination wedding shoots in exotic locations.
Many wedding photographers have names that include words like Timeless, Memento and Memories.
It implies that working with them is like making an investment, by documenting your most precious moments.
The benefits of experiential names are that they make sense to the customers and require little explanation.
The downside is that many companies tend to use the same experiential names, so they become common and don’t help your company stand out.
For example, many wedding photographers use the same experiential words in their names. That can cause their branding and positioning to blend together.
Evocative Names
Evocative names make the most powerful brand names. Some famous examples are Apple, Virgin, Tesla and Amazon.
Often, they paint a bigger picture and work on multiple levels of meaning.
For example, Amazon’s idea was that it would become the world’s largest online store, hence it was named after one of the world’s largest rivers.
These names are so powerful because they evoke strong images, memories and feelings to connect with their audience on an emotional level.
One of my favorite examples in the photography industry is Colossal, a multi-disciplinary studio that does commercial, event and wedding photography and videography.
It’s a name that evokes the idea of being larger than life. It implies to me that their work is made with high production value and can transcend borders.
It’s so much meaning from just a simple name.
How to Come Up With a Photography Business Name
We’ve talked about what a name can do for your photography business, how to do competitive analysis and figure out your positioning, and the different categories of names.
Now, it’s time to get to the business of actually coming up with a name that works for you.
Let’s go through some techniques.
The first technique is brainstorming. You’d want to open up your laptop or get pen and paper, and record down all of the associations and words that come to your mind.
You don’t want to analyze your ideas at this stage. Just keep writing all of the relevant words for your brand or industry—from descriptive words to root words in other languages.
The next technique is to hit the thesaurus.
Review the list of words that you’ve brainstormed and pick out those that you find promising.
They might stand out because they evoke a certain mood or idea, but don’t sound quite right. Or they might describe your brand but feel like they’re lacking punch.
That’s where a thesaurus can come in to generate alternative words, some of which might not be commonly used.
For example, instead of “photography”, a more interesting word I found is “film-craft”. That can be the seed of an idea to build your brand around.
The third technique is to combine words.
A common way to create a unique name is to combine 2 or more words. Some famous examples are Facebook, YouTube and UpWork.
These are common words that come together to create new meaning.
Look at your list of words and see if you can combine them or add a word to any of them.
The final technique is to use our name generator.
It’s an amazing tool for you to come up with different ideas and combinations of words.
You can tell it to include certain words that you like, and to create names with different tones—like formal, friendly or bold.
Taking the example of “film-craft”—I like the word “craft” because it shows the effort and care I put into my work.
Hence, I’ll ask the generator to create names for a photography studio in London, with the word “craft” in the name and with a friendly tone.
Some of the suggestions I’m getting are “Crafted Moments”, “LensCraft” and “Crafty Captures”.
These are great suggestions and I can continue building on them.
Conclusion
This might sound dramatic, but a name can make or break your photography business.
If you have a bad business name, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle from day one.
Starting a business is hard enough as it is, so you want to tilt the odds in your favor.
A good photography business name can set you apart from your competitors, evoke powerful ideas and emotions, and help you dominate your category.
You’re now one step closer to that objective, because you have knowledge that others don’t.
It’s time to put that knowledge into action, so you have an unfair advantage over the competition.