If you think that high fashion photography is all about the clothes, you are certainly wrong.
Even the best-looking clothes can look lifeless and boring when they are showcased online or printed into a catalog if you don’t have the right knowledge of lighting, exposure, posing, and composition.
So, what is fashion photography?
Fashion photography is an extremely demanding discipline that is combining the normal photography elements like composition, lighting, and exposure, with the energy and life of the model and the clothing.
In this guide, you will learn many fashion photography tips on how to make excellent fashion photos that capture the feel and look of the model and also their clothes with no trouble at all.
Read this guide to find out how to become a fashion photographer, starting from the studio shoots to the on-location fashion photography.
If you are new in fashion photography, you should know that it requires knowledge of the primary digital photography such as composition and exposure.
If you already know how to work with your digital camera in manual style, you will definitely have no difficulties to adjust to the fundamentals of fashion photography. As the subject hardly ever moves, you will definitely find fashion photography very easy.
Fashion photography can take be made in two places: indoors, in an interesting environment or in a studio, and outdoors. Outdoor shoots are usually more complex than indoor shoots because the weather is making the camera adaptation more important.
You don’t really need a vast lighting rig as to take excellent fashion photographs. On the contrary, in case that you are a beginner with a limited financial plan, you can take great looking photos with only a single light source and maybe two reflectors.
As a starter, you don’t really need many things to shoot fashion photography, yet you will definitely need a high-quality digital camera. So, make sure that you have a high-quality DSLR camera.
Fashion photos have to be at a high resolution and crisp, so your camera’s megapixels matter much more for fashion photography than it matters for artistic or street photography.
While some fashion photographers swear by a film, don’t be sad if you have just a digital camera. Modern fashion photography digital cameras DSLR are the best camera for fashion photography and it outperforms nearly all film cameras for fashion photography, so if you have the right lenses, nearly all cameras will do.
Here, it is all about possessing the right lenses for the photoshoot setting. If you are a sports or a landscape photographer, set aside your zoom lenses and pick up a wide to medium angle telephoto lenses that are adjustable to among 15 and 55 millimeters.
The best lenses for fashion photography are including 17-40, 18-55 and 16-50 sorts with a fast aperture. You will also need a 50mm fixed focal length lenses with fast aperture ideally among 1.2 and 1.8 to utilize for dark/low-light shots.
You don’t need to purchase some extra flash equipment since you are a beginner. For lightning, take a pair of 500-watt halogen lights, ideally with barn doors, and 2 reflectors as to spread light evenly everywhere in your studio.
As we all already know, not all fashion photography is taken into a studio. From calendars to catalogs, a lot of photo shoot are captured outdoors, usually in exotic places like urban environments and beaches.
If you already know about landscape photography, you will quickly adjust to take fashion photos on location. This fashion photography is usually more demanding than indoor photography because you don’t have total control of the fashion photography lighting sources.
Fashion photos are really rarely published without being edited.
Starting from airbrushing to blemishes and wrinkles as to make the photo brighter and to feel natural, warm and organic. If you know how to use Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom, it will be a huge plus for you as a fashion photographer.
Even if you’re against to airbrush and photo manipulating, understanding how Photoshop is working will make it far simpler for you to optimize your color, lighting, and levels as to produce photos that stand out from the groups and demand attention.