Fashion

Fashion is a term used for a current popular style or practice; it is normally clothing, foot wear or accessories. Fashion can be anything that is current trend that someone wants to be or dress like. Fashion Photography is a genre of photography that simply just focuses on displaying clothing and other fashion items. Photography for fashion is normally done for advertisements or fashion magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair or Elle. Over the years, fashion photography has been developed by enhancing the presence of exotic locations or accessories.

Fashion photography is probably well known for commercial photography because photographs show in adverts as well as editorial photography in magazines. Commercial photography uses a range of techniques; such as catalogue which tries to show the entire detail of clothing and editorial which shows the clothing in unusual ways.

Vogue magazine uses lots of editorial photography in their magazine. This photography lets them experiment with different locations/ props and make up a scene which the clothing/accessories fit into. Although some of the images Vogue produces are quite simple, it is still editorial as the audience doesn’t see the full shot of the product.

Fashion photographers use composition techniques, which structure the picture, for example, they use frame cards and the environment. Most professional fashion photographers use frame cards as it is probably the simplest element that has many different functions. One of its different functions is the ability to help you focus when setting up, it lets you separate the scene visually and look at it like it is a page from a book. When it comes to using the environment, paying attention to lines of direction is another useful technique, for example, it can easily lead the viewer’s eyes to the centre to a photograph, and fashion photographers have to consider lines of direction because it makes the fashion subject stand out in the picture. As well as lines of direction, another technique fashion photographers have to consider is light values. Contrasting between a dark tone and light tone will immediately lead the viewer’s eyes to the product.  Adding an illusion of depth to a two dimensional photography, using meeting lines, can multiply the effect by acting as lines of direction. This puts the subject of the photography in strong focus.