Fashion photography. All photographs © Al Macphee/MiraclePR
Who’s in a fashion shoot team?
Fashion photography usually involves a team of people. You’ve got your photographer, photographic assistant, model, stylist, hair stylist, makeup artist and usually a stockist, designer or manufacturer. You’ve got to keep all those people happy, but your end goal is to get an image ‘in the can’ that shows that dress, or product, at its best.
The hair stylist will style the hair to suit the dress and the scene. If it’s a formal wedding, the bride’s hair will be up. If it’s an autumnal scene, her hair might be blowing free. The makeup person will make sure the makeup goes with the dress. Klingon type face plastics won’t go with a pretty summer dress!
You combine the talents of everyone in the team to create a final image that people will want to look at in a magazine, or click to view online (think of it as positive clickbait!)
Of course, you won’t always have a full team, so you may have to work with what you’ve got. For example, if you don’t have a stylist, you will have to make extra sure the dress or shirt, etc. doesn’t have any creases – or at least has creases where there are supposed to be creases. You can rescue that in Photoshop but you will be there for hours using cloning to ‘iron’ the dress on screen.
With high budget, Vogue-type fashion shoots, the model will be supplied by an agency. The stylist will go to the agency and ask the casting director, “Can you send me half a dozen blondes?” That does sound as if he’s treating them like a piece of meat, but it’s just that he’s decided that the dress will look good on a blonde.
On lower budget shoots, for example an advertising shoot for the local paper’s supplementary magazine, the store or the advertiser might supply the model. They might even sort out the hair and the makeup. I’ve done shoots where the stylist was the reporter, because she knew what she was going to write and could style the outfit to suit. Sometimes people just pull together. Who needs a photographic assistant when you’ve got a reporter who will help you lug in cases from the car?
If your client only has a small budget, established models might not be interested, because they know they will probably get a better offer. So, if you know a friend who wants to break into modelling, you could see if they will agree to do the shoot for what’s known as TFP or TFCD (time for print/CD). In other words, you give them some digital prints for their portfolio.
If you’re supplying the model, make sure you choose the person that suits the dress and the image you’re trying to portray. If you choose a black-haired girl to model a dress where the colours in it would suit a blonde or red-haired girl, it isn’t going to look as good. You’ve got to be careful with your casting.
Working with divas
There aren ‘t that many divas, to be honest, but everyone can be a diva sometimes. You might need to use your diplomacy.
If they say, “You’ve got to shoot me from my best side”, I might say, “Trust me, I know what I’m doing. Don’t worry; you might have a wart on that side of your nose, but we can soon Photoshop it out.” Everyone’s got things about them that they don’t like, but you’re not shooting them, you’re shooting the dress. If you’re going to cross-light it and leave that side of their face in shadow anyway, that’s what you explain to them. “We’re shooting it this way. Don’t worry, that will be hidden. Work with me.”
I’m going to say you should spot the model’s ‘faults’, but they’re not really faults. They’re only issues when it comes to photographing. For example, if you shoot somebody who’s got a hooked nose with a wide angle lens, and with cross-lighting, they’re going to look like a witch.
It’s all about everyone working together to produce the shot that makes everyone look good. Nobody wants to publish a shot that makes somebody look awful. A real professional photographer will never ever publish a photograph that could bring someone into disrepute.
Choosing your location
As the fashion photography examples below illustrate, choice of location makes all the difference.
If you’re shooting a photo shoot from a specific time period, you’ve got to look out for details that won’t fit. For example, if you’re shooting a scene that’s supposed to be medieval, you don’t want anyone with a tattoo on their ankle, or a digital watch on their wrist.
The girl modelling the night dress in the example below has her feet tucked up beneath her. Now, she had a tattoo on her left ankle, so that had to be Photoshopped out. We made that decision because of the layout of the window, which we specifically wanted to use, and the angle we needed to shoot at.
Looking out for these details is everybody’s job, not just the stylist’s. The makeup artist has got to pay close attention to changes in the makeup. It gets hot under those lights, and makeup can get smudged. They should be stopping you and saying, “Hang on, I’ve just got to touch that up, and there’s an eyelash out of place,” etc. Creases in the backdrop is the photographic assistant’s job. The photographer is the last port of call, even though they’ve got other things on their mind.
You work as a team, so you’re supposed to back each other up. Everybody makes mistakes. There have even been some major mistakes that have been missed in big budget movies.
Of course, you could put up a green screen behind the model and add a Caribbean background in Photoshop. If you do this, make sure your lighting matches the scene you have in mind. There’s a lot of stuff online where the model has been shot using studio flash and then copied and pasted on to a beach background, or another background that doesn’t suit. The background is obviously lit by natural light, and the result just smacks of somebody who hasn’t done their homework properly. I’m not into that type of Photoshop manipulation anyway. I would rather persuade you to take me on holiday to the Caribbean, and we’ll shoot properly there!
Fashion photography lighting tips
Every fashion photography shoot will have different lighting requirements, but you’ve always got to use good lighting which picks out the detail in the clothing. You can’t go all arty and blur the dress. The designer is going to get really upset if they’ve spent months sewing some really nice embroidery and you use a soft spot that blurs it. Hot spots from your flash or floodlights can be a bit of a problem too if you have silky dresses. Be careful to avoid your lights reflecting off the dress.
Example 1:
The clothes were one-off, hand-made designer pieces – which suggested an ‘Olde English’ period style. The hair stylist and makeup did the hair and makeup to suit. We chose Bickleigh Castle, on the other side of Exeter, as a location. This dress looked like a wedding dress, so we went to the castle chapel and made her look like a bride.
Example 2:
This dress looked like it could have been lingerie, so we had the model looking out of the window wistfully, waiting for her knight in shining armour to return from battle. We could have chosen a grand prix car as a backdrop, but that would have been tacky. This location was more buyer-friendly.
Example 3:
We shot this model beneath the trees, because the flowery gown suited the autumn foliage.
Getting started with fashion photography
If you’re starting out in fashion photography, it’s worth considering doing a fashion shoot for free – for your portfolio. Whenever I’m deciding whether to do a shoot, I always ask myself, “Is it worth it for me?” It might not be worth it financially, but it might be worth it for experience, for marketing purposes or even for your mental health: to do something fresh.
If I haven’t done a fashion shoot for a long time, and I need some updated images for my portfolio, I might do one at a discount. Or, if I was writing a book on how to be a fashion photographer, I might use it as a marketing tactic. I might say, “I’ll do your fashion shoot for a couple of hundred quid off, if you let me use your pictures in the book.”
Another example: If Vogue came to me next week and wanted to book me for a fashion shoot, I would take the work on, but I would be thinking, “I haven’t done a fashion shoot for such a long time, I could do with some practice to get my head back in it.” Then, I might get a couple of people in who want to have some photos taken. They get some practice, I get some practice. They help me get back into the swing of things. As long as everyone’s on the same wavelength and you’re all getting something out of it, why charge the earth?