What does planning for a second or third brand shoot actually look like?

By the time we stepped into round three with Shepherds Global Classroom, we for sure weren’t guessing anymore. We had real receipts to scour. Newsletters that had leaned hard on the same few images. Website pages built around photos that had done their job well. And a gallery that showed us exactly what resonated, what stretched the longest, and which images were getting tired a bit too quickly.

Shepherds Global Classroom exists to make theological education accessible anywhere—homes, sanctuaries, cafés, even shade trees—through a free, twenty-course curriculum available in over 30 languages and used around the world. We’ve been able to show iterations of this at every shoot, and stepping up to do it again in a refreshed way was a blast.

When Tim and I talked through what this round needed to do, we stayed pretty practical. We asked where they were coming up empty-handed, what images they were using on repeat, and which ones had earned their place versus which ones were simply tired.

One of the clearest gaps was representation. Some of the most-used images centered a singular language or a single set of hands. They were strong images, but over time, they started telling a narrower story than the brand actually lives out. There was one photo in particular—a hand lifting a book from a stack—that had become iconic for them. But it also [accidentally] only featured English versions of the curriculum. What was an off-the-cuff win from a previous shoot was ready for a more intentional rethink.

That realization shaped the whole creative brief for round three.

We weren’t starting from scratch on this one. Instead, we reimagined what already worked and got to be creative about how to iterate on concepts we really loved for their brand.

This looked like intentionally swapping English versions of the books for more languages in the frame. Bringing in more color and context through notebooks, a bilingual Bible, props, and paper backdrops. Choosing a space that felt a little more like a home than a studio, without losing the clean versatility SGC needs for print and design overlays.

And threading it all together was a simple idea: anywhere can become a classroom.

So we built scenes that felt borrowed from real life. A chair pulled back mid-study. Coffee half-drunk. Curriculum pulled from a bag, stacked, carried, opened, shared. Images that feel like learning was already happening, and we just walked in.

By the end of the shoot, the gallery felt like what this brand actually needs right now. A visual story that better reflects the global, multi-ethnic reality of how this curriculum is used.

These images are now doing the work—printed, mailed, layered into newsletters, and built directly into the next season of Shepherds Global Classroom.