“Fashion” photography … how different can it be from shooting a wedding or your girlfriend in some nice clothes? There’s no real mystery to shooting ‘fashion’ or no big secret to capturing a model posing for the camera.
Unfortunately, you would be wide of the mark and greatly surprised as to what it takes to be a great ‘fashion’ photographer.
The Style
As most professional photographers know, it is never about your camera, fancy lighting equipment or computer skills. Those are simply tools to capture YOUR “Vision. Your journey truly begins with the complex, and sometimes obscure, struggle in creating YOUR “Style”. This is a BIG word in ‘fashion’ photography. The simple answer … it’s all about YOU and your STYLE!
The intangible ingredients required to succeed in fashion photography is not for the faint of heart but only for the few who can go with the fear. To begin with, here are some simple things I want you to keep in the back of your mind … ‘Fashion’ photography is anything you want to make it. You are only limited by your imagination, where ‘nice’ photographs simply don’t make the cut. Great fashion images are mostly made up of smoke and mirrors. Fashion photography is really a make-believe world, where everything that is beautiful, and perfect, is fake.
The Prop
Great fashion photography is not of the ‘real’ world. As you might use a chair for your model to sit on. As a ‘fashion’ photographer, I do not see the chair as a chair as real people do in the ‘real’ world. I imagine it first as a ‘prop’, an object to be used, as I perceive it.
The Trend
Many of you will go through numerous fashion magazines to find images that turn your crank, maybe to find something that you would like to emulate. Fair enough, but not good enough. As the photos you are looking at were probably shot about a year ago, so your ideas are already old news. As a fashion photographer you have to be thinking a year ahead of the ‘trends’ and what you shoot has to be exciting and avant-garde to those who view your photographs when they are published. I guess this is where the term “forward thinking” applies. Another very important factor and crucial to your vision, is the casting of your talent (model). She/he has to be the next new “look”, the face that will change the fashion world. A lot of pressure, requiring intuition, chutzpah and some luck. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. Then comes the actual physical shoot itself.
That is where I come in … at our workshop in August, the real work begins and it all boils down to a simple yet complex factor: Direction.
