

Today with retouching it is not that important anymore. They did not want their lighting secrets to be stolen. This paranoid behavior was explained by the fact that when photographers were shooting film, their light set-up was the ink for their signature. There used to be a time when fashion photographers would not allow interns, assistants, or anybody that was not essential to their shoots on their set. I guess he is sipping a margarita somewhere under a palm tree while I am learning voodoo. My agent ran off with my money and exiled himself outside of France. Agents and agencies are not to be always trusted either. Clients rarely pay on time and some clients tend to forget about paying altogether. The funny thing about money in the fashion industry is that there seems to be quite a lot of it but unless your name is part of the star system it seems to avoid your pocket. Avoid yourself the frustration for time spent on something that does not embody your style. If it is not that crucial to your career move on and don’t look back. If you feel that you are not given freedom, weigh the value of being published in that magazine. Either morph into a star photographer to whom people will unroll the red carpet, or lockdown the direction of the shoot before. There are two ways of getting out of that jam. The stylist or the fashion editor becomes your client even if they are paying you pocket money. You will not be able to choose your styling or your model or even your crew. Weirdly enough when you do get paid you can find yourself being limited in what you are allowed to do. Obviously when you begin you start at the bottom of the ladder. Some editorial work pays a photographers fee, some reimburse your cost (and that is already great), and some pays nothing, leaving you to cover the production costs of a shoot, ranging from food for the crew to the retouching. But it goes further then that: sometimes you actually pay to work.
FASHION LOVE PHOTOGRAPHY FOR FREE
If it was just working for free for the time that you need to build your name, you could find a moral/economical investment to justify it. And that is where you need to be if you want to be taken seriously. Working for free is normal in the fashion editorial world. I often hear photographers pest about image-makers that work for free. Here are a few reality checks so that you know what to expect. Finally it entails a lot of will and creativity to build a portfolio with a recognizable style. It calls for a lot of self-control as you often work with prima donnas. It demands that your favorite dish is pasta out of a can, as you might not see any real money for quite a long while. To help you bypass the queue in front of the door of editors or fashion houses, you are required to have patience or connections (ideally both if not you might have to consider cryonics).

First of all if you want a real shot at it, you need to be in one of the fashion capitals, Paris, New York, London, Milan, where fashion is actually happening and where you can gain access to a crew. It is collaborative work where connections are way more important for a photographer then their lighting skills.Ī career in fashion photography requires, well a lot of things. You cannot shoot a fashion spread without a crew.
FASHION LOVE PHOTOGRAPHY FULL
What started as a commercial need of brands to illustrate their collections became in the last 50 years a galaxy on its own revolving around a new sun, this season trendiness, and full of stars stylists, fashion editors, fashion brands, hair stylist, make-up artists and obviously models. Said like that it seems so bleak compared to its magnetic power. Fashion photography, it is a genre of photography that focuses on displaying clothes or other fashion items.
