Shooting fashion photography is often easy, but doing it well presents a challenge. You can create great images that attract potential customers with the proper knowledge and tools, like Photoshop or editing software.
1. The first step to getting started with fashion photography is picking your preferred fashion style genre. You might enjoy shooting streetwear better than high-end professional clothing. Streetwear has a bright color palette and usually requires using colors from specific palettes instead of blending colors from different palettes together in an image. High-end professional clothing tends to have black as its dominant color. So your focus will be on contrast breaking up shadows and highlights without losing too much detail in them once blended in the final image.
2. Fashion is about walking the line between beauty and design. You don’t want your muses to look like mannequins; you need them to have organic energy that suggests motion while maintaining their posture. This can achieved by using posing techniques that do not require uncomfortable, unnatural positions for your models.
For example, instead of having a model lean forward with her arms in front of her. Ask them to take two side steps backward, so they are slightly bent at the knees or have them take one step back with both feet together, so there is room for movement in the image when it’s edited later on. Pay to their pose the angle of their head, the rise, and fall of their chest, the direction of their gaze—to make them appear graceful.
3. You can further capture movement in your images by using slow shutter speeds during your shoot. If you want a more abstract background blur with some subjects appearing more focused than others, use 1/8 or 1/4 of a second shutter speed on your camera. For less abstract blurring that puts all subjects into focus, set your camera’s shutter speed to at least ¼ of a second, so it is long enough for motion blur to subside slightly before the image is captured.
4. Use natural lighting whenever possible when shooting fashion photography. It is one of the most flattering light sources for people, and it allows you to control shadows on your models’ faces more easily. If there are no clouds in the sky, diffuse harsh sunlight by hanging a sheer white curtain in front of your shoot, so shadows become softer naturally instead of being cast in sharp contrast.
5. Build up natural light when shooting indoor fashion photography with large windows or skylights present in the scene. If possible so that your shots have beautiful highlights, mid-tones. And shadows throughout due to the various intensities of light falling onto different areas of your model’s body. This type of lighting tends to have minimal grain because it has just enough reached to illuminate skin tone but does not reach high enough into the spectrum to make skin tone appear as a bright, dark, and gray mess.
6. If you don’t have enough light of any kind to take photos that will work for print purposes. Use artificial light of the right color temperature to illuminate your shoot instead. Incandescent lights produce the same type of orange glow as candlelight, slightly dimmed by fluorescent technology. So they can used if you set up more than one and create a balance between them. So shadows aren’t too dark or too bright.
7. When shooting with artificial lighting alone, use daylight-balanced bulbs. Because they are not affect negatively by incandescent light as much as tungsten bulbs are. These types of lights create a whiter, brighter glow that is close to natural lighting on cloudy days; you can also use flashlights with this type of light rather than taking the time to set up more complicated studio equipment if you need additional light for your shoot.
8. Leave yourself enough room for cropping in future images by composing tightly around your models’ faces instead of leaving lots of space above their heads for visual impact. Crop in on the eyes using the rule of thirds, leaving enough room at all four corners of the frame to make it easy to shoot a portrait of your models that is more symmetrical than if you left a lot of space above their heads.
Conclusion:
Fashion photography is a difficult type of image-making to master. And it takes patience and dedication to get the best results. However, if you follow these photo tips for fashion photography shoots. You will be able to produce great images that your models and clients will love in no time at all.
