Responsibilities of a fashion photographer – photography tips
On a fashion shoot you are pretty much responsible for everything. This is part of the business of photography. Whether you are at the beginning stages of photography or the more advanced stages you are responsible for the final outcome of the shoot.
When I first started shooting fashion photography I did a lot of TFP shoots for my fashion portfolio. For those of you who don’t know TFP means trade for prints or more commonly TFCD trade for print images on cd. After a couple years of shooting I still took on TFCD assignments. When I would come home from shooting my wife would ask why are you still shooting for free? Did you get paid today? If you didn’t get paid why are you doing it? Well, unless you can look at your fashion portfolio and say that every image you ever wanted to take is there and in order and everything is perfect it is hard not to take on these assignments in the beginning of your career. Often times you have to purchase wardrobe, hire stylists, makeup artists, models or convince these people to work with you for free. You do all of this hard work because you need the samples in your book that best reflects your style of photography and highlights what you do best. These images aren’t going to magically appear in your book through high paid assignments when you have never had a high paid assignment. If you want to be a photographer for Sports Illustrated Swimwear (who ironically, generally hires fashion photographers) you need to start building up your fashion portfolio and a self produced trip to an exotic island might be in order to start getting the appropriate samples for your book. It’s the same thing if you want to shoot for a bikini company or beauty company or lingerie client or fashion designer. You need to go out an photograph samples of their product and produce amazing results before people will start to hire you for high end jobs.
What if you are a well established photographer who has been in this business for many years and clients regularly hire you? Your responsibilities increase! You are responsible for managing everyone on the set. The final picture is your vision.
There may be a few people on set and there may be many people on the set. What are you going to do if your makeup artist doesn’t show up? How would you handle that? Where are the clothes? Are they steamed? Does the model fit into them? Where is the fashion model? Is she really on her way or is she at home still asleep from a big party the night before? It may rain on the day of your shoot when you are supposed to be shooting outside. The client insists that the shoot still take place outside on location. What do you do? Is it overcast that day? Is there heavy wind?
O.k., let’s assume you got the images and it is for a beauty client. Who is retouching them? When will they be done? How much is it going to cost? Or perhaps you are traveling with 100,000 worth of couture gowns in a foreign country and you stylist forgot the clothing on a train. This stuff really happens!
I flew to New York once for an assignment and brought some expensive equipment with me. My luggage was lost and did not show up for two weeks. The shoot was over and I was already back in Los Angeles when they found my bags.
And don’t forget the dreaded hard drive crash. Hard drives are electronic backup devices that you buy in camera and computer stores for a couple hundred dollars. These things fail! Back your work up! What exactly do you say to the model, agency, client when you can’t find their photographs.
Photography insurance. I don’t want to sound like I am exaggerating because I am not. Yesterday I was at a beach photo shoot. I was shooting with a model when I heard what sounded like a loud explosion. I turned around and our cars were totaled by a military transport vehicle. All of my cameras and equipment (except what I had in my hands at the time) were in the vehicle. Thank God my computer wasn’t. My clients computer was. We lost a lot yesterday. Do you have photography insurance?
O.k., I don’t want to scare you but these are some of the realities that you encounter over the years as a fashion photographer. So, if you are faint of heart or shy from responsibility it is time to be brave, get organized and start shooting.
Yes, i said that didn’t I? Start shooting. Rinse. Repeat. Subscribe to this blog via my main page.
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Very informative.