Ideally, you want a team of professional photographers, makeup artists, stylists, and models to produce great fashion photographs for your brand. After all, fashion photos are investments that can make or break a collection (or even an entire brand). Unfortunately, doing a big-budget fashion photo shoot isn’t always an option.
Many designers actually take photos of their creations themselves. If you often find yourself in this situation, there is no need to worry. You can still produce great photos with a few tips and tricks we are going to discuss in this article. Let’s jump right in!
Location Matters
When doing a fashion photo shoot, the background you include in every photo matters just as much as the fashion pieces being photographed. You want to produce photos that suit their intended use perfectly. If you’re taking photos of your new line for a catalog, for instance, you want a clean and light background to make the fashion items really pop.
For Instagram, magazines, or other purposes, however, shooting outdoor is the way to go. Finding a location that matches the overall theme of your designs will help make the photos (and the products) more appealing to the audience.
What you need is a background or a landscape that’s interesting but not overpowering. You want to keep it clean and compose every shot correctly to make the models and the fashion they wear the stars of the show. There are a lot of interesting backgrounds to choose from too; even a cracked wall or a mural can be a great backdrop for a fashion shoot.
Mind the Lighting
You don’t need to rely on a big and expensive lighting rig to get beautiful fashion photos, but that doesn’t mean you can forget lighting altogether. It is still necessary to manage the light hitting your models and the products they wear to accentuate all the right elements of the fashion pieces.
When shooting in a studio, this is something you can do rather easily. You can use flashes with lighting modifiers to shape light in any way you like. You can even add streaks of light depending on the modifiers you use and the final photos you want to achieve.
Shooting outdoor is a bit more challenging. That said, it is still possible to alter the way the light hits your models using simple tools like diffusers, reflectors, and fill-in flash.
Use Composition to Your Advantage
Since you don’t have an entire army of assistants attending to all the details, you need to be clever with the way you capture your fashion photos. According to Virtualphotographystudio.com, the most powerful tool to use in this situation is composition. A simple shift in the angle of view or the position of the model in the frame can alter the way fashion photos look and feel.
Don’t forget to pay attention to the way you compose your models in relation to the backdrop, especially when shooting outdoors. Don’t hesitate to try unusual angles – like shooting the model from the top – and experiment a little bit to really bring the best out of fashion pieces. You’ll have fantastic fashion photos to use at the end of the shoot.
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