If you prefer, you can invite your client and others involved in the photo shoot to view the board and add their contributions. Using a mood board when building your concept and creating a story for a fashion photography shoot also helps you to get buy-in from the client. It can contain any image that you feel captures the feeling or essence you want to convey through your photo shoot. Your mood board doesn't have to consist exclusively of fashion photographs. You can use a social platform to create your mood board or put together a physical board using images you find in magazines, newspapers or books.

One way to create a concrete vision is to create a mood board. In a more general sense, it's also worth reading up on and studying lighting techniques, posing techniques, photo editing processes and makeup and hair ideas. It's also worth looking at examples of other fashion photo shoots to get an idea of what has worked in the past and what might not have worked. You want to learn as much as you can about the designer whose clothes you are shooting. Research can be the fashion photographer's best friend. To tell a story, you need to have the concept in advance, as well as an idea of how you'll go about developing that concept. If you go into the shoot on the day-of expecting 'inspiration' to strike, you are probably going to be disappointed, and the people working with you are likely to be frustrated.įashion photography is usually about telling a story. You can't be too well-prepared for a fashion photo shoot. Preparation, an understanding of your tools and a willingness to take risks can all lead to a successful fashion photography shoot. With so many moving parts and different ideas floating in the air, it can be a challenge to have a fashion photo shoot go off without a hitch. High fashion photography is also often the work and product of a team of people, from the designer of the clothing and the models posing to the photographer and the stylists and makeup artists working on the shoot. For one thing, the clothing often is the focus of the best fashion photography images. Although on the surface, fashion photography can look like any other type of photography, there are notable differences. “Photography is bound to time in precisely the same way as fashion,” Siegfried Kracauer once wrote today, that peculiar speed and scale show us the future of the image.Beautiful clothing, beautiful models - working as a fashion photographer can be a dream come true for many people. Here, Artforum highlights the work of those who have gone furthest to investigate and inhabit this world of extremity. Fashion photography might represent the most radical surrender of conventional authorial control to endless teams of people, to a vast multiplicity of pages, screens, streams of content. Photography may be post-Pictures and post-Internet, but it can’t seem to get over its neurotic relationship to advertising, with surprisingly few artists traversing those domainsand those who do often keeping the bodies of work distinctly separate, or even secret.Īnd yet it’s fashion photography that has served as a testing ground for the visual itselffor new means of postproduction, for the massive dissemination of imagery, for the picture as social media. Even though the age-old categories of “art” and “commercial” image production may seem obsolete, the distinctions are still surprisingly rigid.

But the art world has never quite known what to do with fashion photography.

It’s this rapaciousness that might describe all photographic images todaythat sea of indiscriminate data, of branding-as-content. Mark Borthwick, Days Off, 1995, Cibachrome, dimensions variable.įROM THE CLUB KID to the rich kid, athleisure to the luxury watch, fashion photography has always had a voracious eye.

Fashion art photography