Fashion Photography Fundamentals

Fstoppers previews its eleven-hour tutorial with Louisville photographer Clay Cook. Excerpts show him finding Rembrandt light by rotating a hand in sunlight, enlarging diffusion to cover a body, raising a studio head eight feet to sculpt a chin, and retoucher Jordan Hartley darkening sunglass lenses with a gradient mask.

Fashion portraiture, as dphog defines it, sits between the two genres, focusing on how three simple garments make a person feel rather than selling clothes, after Peter Lindbergh. Lighting is deliberately imperfect: single lights kept low, small gridded softboxes and a gridded beauty dish for a contrasty, sophisticated edge.

Part one of dphog's fashion basics covers cameras, lenses and genre. Any raw-shooting body will do; a 35mm tells story, a 50mm flatters and an 85mm is classic, never using wide angles to escape small rooms. Commercial fashion tells viewers what to think, high fashion lets them think.

Part two of dphog's fashion basics tackles personal style, contrasting hard-lit, rebellious youth-culture work in the vein of Juergen Teller with the presenter's story-and-emotion-led editorial look, deciding whether images are voyeuristic or make eye contact, and reflecting the zeitgeist, before condensed directing tips: cast well and give models characters.

Joseph Tran lists his kit for studio fashion shoots: any crop or full-frame camera, since strobe work at f/5.6 to f/13 needs no fast primes; a single strobe in a 72-inch silver parabolic umbrella with diffusion; and a laptop tethered via a high-visibility Tether Tools cable to Capture One.

Karl Taylor dispels the glamour myth, outlining the ladder from low-budget editorial through catalogue and standard advertising to high-end campaigns handled by agencies like Art and Commerce. He compares UK model agency day rates, suggests negotiating tests with new faces or using friends, and urges respectful collaboration with models.

Lindsay Adler recalls her first editorial, with borrowed boutique clothes and ever-changing lighting, to explain what a successful one needs: a concept or theme such as colour blocking or knitwear tying the series together, and a creative team of hair, makeup and wardrobe stylists found by tracing Instagram tags.

Lara Jade offers five tips: mine Pinterest and seasonal trends for mood boards in Photoshop, understand editorial work showcases ideas and markets a photographer to commercial clients, keep adding skills like continuous lighting and beauty, remember one lens and one light suffice, and treat marketing as a daily job.

Andrew of Beyond Photography previews a three-day Langkawi fashion shoot with creative director Shukri, explaining how a mood board becomes a technical shoot board marking light positions. He then shows online sellers how to model their stock and builds a huge soft light from mahjong paper on a C-stand.