Excerpt from my blog:

How To Become A Successful Fashion Photographer/Fashion Model

Responsibilities of a fashion photographer - from concept to conception.

Creating a photograph is a very exciting journey. Inspiration is all around us and there is no one right way to approach the creative process. There are however, many elements that are important to include in your workflow and I would like to discuss them here.

The way an image looks is entirely up to you. On a fashion shoot you are pretty much responsible for everything. The number one job of a fashion photographer is to sell clothes and make them look amazing.

There are myths out there that fashion photographers spend all their time with beautiful models on sets in exotic locales, shooting images for magazines like Vogue. Before this is even a remote possibility you will need to figure out how to be a leader and businessman.

You will need to have an understanding of art. This is not inherent in everyone. You may acquire this understanding by regular visits to museums or courses in art at your local college. It is also very important to subscribe to fashion magazines (especially the ones you want your work to appear in) to start expirementing with concepts and shooting a similar style that appears in its pages.

The reward for all this hard work is that you will be creating art out of a very useful product: clothes. You will be responsible for presenting these images for the public to see for the very first time in magazines, billboards, television advertisements and many other mediums. This is a lot of power for one person to have. Some of your images may go on to sell for thousands of dollars and you may very well earn your place in photography history.

In the beginning stages of your photography career you will need samples for your book. It is your job to create the very best images you can. When I first started shooting I did a lot of TFP or TFCD. TFP means "trade for prints" and TFCD means "trade for images on cd." I had to shoot many models for free to get new images for my photography portfolio. This is a lot of hard work but very necessary to get your career going. Shooting for trade also can yield some amazing work. Under these conditions you are free to control all of the elements of a shoot (location, hair, makeup, styling, etc.) Some of my favorite images in my body of work have come from trade shoots that I did at the beginning of my career.

As you grow and begin to shoot commercial assignments and build a collection of photographs you will focus your energy on commercial photography assignments. As an established fashion photographer your responsibilites increase. You may need to hire an assistant, hire makeup artists, organize location permits, find a stylist, be responsible for retouching or hire a retouch artist, arrange a casting for a client and pay the bills to keep your studio open and running. If it sounds like a daunting task, it is! But fashion photography is your chosen profession so you need to learn how.

What do you do on set if your hair person does not show up? What if your camera breaks? I flew to a job in New York City and had my photography equipment completely diverted to another airport. The equipment didn't show up for about two weeks. If you are working with a small budget and shooting indoors what do you do? Where are the clothes? Are they steamed? Does the model fit into them? Where is the model? What if she is sick? What if you are responsible for shooting an advertisement outdoors and you find out that it is raining that week? Clients are rarely concerned with weather conditions and much more interested with you delivering a product rain or shine.

O.k., let's say you have captured amazing images for your client and successfully backed them up onto your computer. Who is going to retouch them? How much will that cost your client? How long will that take? The client may need the images back quickly.

Those are just a fraction of pitfalls I have had to deal with and overcome in my experience as a fashion photographer. From concept to conception, your job is to make the clothes look beautiful and create amazing photographs I didn't write this to discourage you but to help you think of some of the problems that may arise in your journey. Nothing beats the actual experience that you will learn in the field of photography. Still, I have written many articles for you to help you in your journey. You will find them in my blog.

Enjoy the process!

Robert Voltaire