From the outside, it appears as though fashion blogging is easy: great outfit, pretty background, photo that looks like it was put together in minutes. In most cases, it’s much messier. You’re having trouble with the lighting, getting poses right, a photographer who wants to be somewhere else or maybe doesn’t want to be, and the feeling that nothing you are shooting looks as good as what you are thinking, to say the least. Sound familiar? The secret is that it’s not about the high-priced equipment or the professional team, it’s about the artistry of fashion photography. It’s all about knowing a few principles and then learning to do them until they are second nature. This guide will cover the most essential ones, so that you can start making improvements without doing it all at once. Many creators also take inspiration from a fashion lifestyle magazine to understand posing, styling, and storytelling techniques that make fashion photos feel more natural and polished.
Light Is Everything — Learn to Work With It
Light is what makes a good fashion photo a memorable one. Not the outfit. Not the location. The light. Even the most stunning outfit can look flat and unflattering with bad lighting and a simple white T-shirt and pair of jeans can look like a magazine spread with good lighting.
The first place to start is natural light, particularly if you’re not using the professional equipment. The golden hour, that period of time which is about an hour after sunrise or an hour before sunset, is a sweet, soft light that is ideal for skin and fabric. The most problematic time to shoot is midday when the intense light forms unflattering shadows under the eyes, nose and chin, which can be hard to correct even during post-production. When shooting during the day, use the shadow side of a building, under a tree canopy or in a covered outdoor area where the light is soft and not harsh.
For bloggers who want to go deeper on understanding how light, composition, and styling all work together, reading content from a dedicated fashion lifestyle magazine is a great way to train your eye passively. Whether it’s watching professional editorial shoots or simply scrolling through them on a regular basis, over time you will develop a visual vocabulary that will affect your own style of shooting.
Your Background Matters More Than You Think
There’s a lot of bloggers who spend a lot of time getting their outfit right, and very few that spend any time thinking about what’s going on behind them and it’s doing a lot of serious work in each frame, which is sad. Too many distracting elements in the background detract from the subject. Backgrounds that don’t match the outfit colors ruin the entire look. Too dark or too light backgrounds can also pose exposure issues that can be difficult to correct afterward.
The safest way — particularly at the beginning — is to maintain simple and complementary backgrounds. A clean brick wall, a quiet street with good architecture, a patch of greenery or even just a plain painted wall can have an enormous amount of work. The idea is to have the background complement the outfit, but not overwhelm it. Imagine it’s the scene design for a film and the clothes are the leading actors.
But be not put off by interesting places altogether. Photographs can look editorial and exciting when the setting is unusual, such as an old tiled staircase, a colorful doorway, a market with texture and life behind it. When it comes to a busy background, it’s generally just a matter of color and tone matching the attire of the subject.
Posing Feels Awkward Until It Doesn’t
Nobody is very comfortable in front of a camera at first. That self-consciousness, that ‘what-to-do’ affect, shows up in photos as you’d expect. It’s not a trick to act like a model. It’s just for the fun and games.
One of the simplest ways to obtain a more natural looking shot is to move. Walk into or out of the camera, half way. Take a shot with your hair or jacket in place.Shoot with hair or jacket fixed. Turn away from the lens and then back around again. Have a good laugh at something that is really funny. These are little things that help loosen up the general stiffness and provide a variety of options for the photographer to shoot other variations of the same pose rather than just a bunch of straight-on poses.
When working with friends or partners as your photographer, provide direction, don’t wait for them to pose for you, just have them shoot bursts of photos as you move! A lot of the best fashion blog photos are taken between shots; it is a random moment that no one specifically planned. Taking 10 shot after careful thinking and hoping one of them succeeds is not a good idea, so you should shoot 100 shots and select the best ones.
Editing Is a Skill Worth Developing
While it is not necessary to be a Photoshop master, there are some basics to learn for editing your photos well. No matter how good the light, raw (unprocessed) photos typically require some editing before they’ll be suitable for posting. There are several factors that can help elevate a shot from “decent” to “polished,” among them brightness, contrast, color temperature and sharpness.
Bloggers eventually stumble upon Lightroom, the desktop and mobile application — it’s the one that provides true control of your photos without a steep learning curve. Useful when you are getting started to use presets, but don’t become too dependent on them. The same preset that’s a looker on a warm golden hour shot could turn into a flatterer on a cooler, shadier shot. It helps to be able to make manual adjustments, if necessary, even a bit.
Be careful of over-editing. The use of heavy filters, over saturated colors, and plasticized skin are pretty much out of fashion editing methods that have a way of making photos look less authentic and more beautiful. When editing, the ideal place is around the time that you start to think, “This is the best version of what was actually there.
Final Thought
Great Fashion photography is a skill and like any skill, the more you practice it, the better you will get, and the more you practice it the more honest you will be with yourself. Review the results of each shoot to see what went right and what went wrong; not only what you liked and didn’t like about the outfits but also about the light, the composition, the posing and the editing. Well, the bloggers that always come up with beautifully presented content are not necessarily more talented than anyone else. They have simply kept shooting and learned what isn’t working and just showed up again. First get the basics here and allow yourself to take things at your own pace, no perfection necessary while you’re learning, and things will work out.
