Reseach for shoot and layout idea

What is fashion photography -

In it's simpilest form, fashion photography is mostly a genre of photography which is very much devoted to displaying certain things mostly of different types of clothing and other fashion items, things like necklaces and umbrellas etc which can make a photo very interesting.

Quite a lot of the time fashion photography is mostly conducted for things like advertisements etc, and the other most popular thing which fashion photography is used for would be magazines, the reason why fashion magazines are so popular is because there are so many out there. A few examples would be things like vanity fair, vogue, Bazaar etc.

Here are a few examples below which are all of different types of fashion genres:










Research into two fashion photographers:

Irving Penn - Specialising in both fashion and still life photography:

Backround information-

Irving Penn was an American photographer mostly known for his still life portraiture and his fashion photography. Irving was born on June 16, 1917, in Plainfield, New Jersey, to Harry and Sonia Penn.In 1934 he attended the Pennsylvania Museum and shcool of Industrial art in Philadelphia until he graduated in 1938. Durin this time he studied a whole range of different subjects including drawing, painting, graphic and industrial arts.

Soon after he graduated he worked for many years doing fashion photography for the well known Vogue magazine and then in 1953 he founded his own studio. He was among one of the first photographers to shoot his subjects in front of a simple grey or white backdrop is used this way of shooting much more effectively than other photographers. He then started to expand his studio by starting to build a set of upright angled backdrops in which to form a stark, acute corner. Soon after he shot loads of different subjects which included people like Marcel Duchamp, Georgia O'Keeffe and Pablo Picasso and loads more.

Irving Penn photographed his still life objects and his models in very unusual arrangements, each with great detail and clarity. While his were always very clean and clear, his subjects varied very widely.

Examples of Irving Penns work -







Peter de Mulder - Specialising in both fashion and underwater photography:

The reason why I have decied to do some research into this photographer is because his work fits very good into the style of photography which I am carrying out and the way that he works with his images will help me alot as it is mostly the same technique as what I am going to want to use for some of my layouts the reason why that I feel this way is becaus he focuses on fashion photography and underwater photography and this is mostly the same kind of photography which I am going to carry out.

Backround information about him-

Peter De Mulder started doing photography from a very early age from the age of three years old. For a very long time now Peter has focused on fashion photography and as is equaly experienced in underwater photography by using free diving and scubadiving techniques. For the last twenty years he has also covered extensively india.

The main way that Peter De Mulder creates his final images is by using his fashion photography skills and his underwater photography skills and merging them together into very exciting images and this is mostly the same thing which I am trying to do.

Below I have included some examples of his work and have tried to pick out the most exciting images that he has created, I hope that you find them as interesting as I do:







My chosen style of fashion photography:

My chosen style of fashion photography to research and then to shoot something similar to is going to be still life fashion photography which includes things like using manikins etc.

Still Life Fashion photography is mostly a type of fashion photography which is very devoted to the photographing of clothing without models which instead of the clothing being on a model it is put onto a manikin to make it more interesting and also cheaper to shoot rather than paying a model to come into the studio and then to model the clothes etc.

Still life fashion photography comes in a variety of different formats but the two most popular forms would be Abercrombie flat and also as I mentioned earlier which is using manikins this can be done in two ways either with the manikin left in the picture or with it cropped out in post production either way is still very effective.

Abercrombie flat - Avercrombie flat also known as flat styling is the technique which involves garments being laid flat onto a styling board, and then being hand-styled by either the photographer or the creater of the clothes. The clothing is then shot and edited with the finished image looking alive with natural movement.

Using a manikin - this is when the clothing is placed on a mannequin with the mannequin left in the final photograph. This technique is particularly effective when used to present specfic sets of clothing or when outfits need to be shown worn together. Another way to do this would be like I mentioned before which would be to when it comes to the editing to crop out the parts of the manikin to create a picture with just the clothes standing up right which would give off the effect known as the invisible manikin.

Examples of still life fashion photography -

Examples of how I am going to shoot and edit the pictures -

Black studio back drop –



Example of a manikin in front of a black backdrop but without any clothes as this is an example –



Cropping on Photoshop –



Compositing on Photoshop –

Text and caption ideas for fashion layouts -

The main text and captions which I am going to include in the final layouts will be the names of the things which inspired the fashion designer to create her clothes in the way that she did and they all relate to things in the ocean as this is the overall style of her clothes.

The text which I am going to include in the final layouts are as follows-

See through shimmery shorts - inspired by 'OPEN BRAIN' coral.

Aqua blue frilly shorts - inspired by 'PLEROGURASINUOSA' bubble coral.

White trousers & blue and white top- inspired by the movement of the ocean.

Ideas for shoot and edit of fashion student pictures -

• Studio backdrop colour – Black

• Fashion students clothes to be on a manikin as will all be composited out when it comes to editing.

• Some sort of a fan to blow the trousers to make it seem like they are floating underwater.

• The reason for shooting in front of a black background is that it is one of the easiest colours to cut out and composite something else over the top as it helps to pick out all of the detail of the clothes.

• When I use the fan to blow the trousers I will place it at the back of the manikin on the backdrop, this will not be a big problem that it will show up in the picture as I will do the same as with the manikin showing up which will be to crop it all out with the background and to composite over.

• When it comes to editing the photos, I will start by firstly as I mentioned before to start by cropping out all of the background and the things that I do not want in the finished picture and compositing over it.

• To go with the whole underwater feel to it I have decided to replace the background with bright colours and to make it feel like it is underwater with things like fish and coral etc.

• As this assignment is both layout and design, I will finish the edit of the picture by putting captions around the picture which will be by naming all of the different reefs on the picture which the fashion student has created; I will do this by trying to make the captions blend in with the picture.

Chosen photos from shoot for fashion student

Edited pictures without the poles from the manikins

Finished fashion layouts

Evaluation of finished layouts

When I was first given the assignment I had to pair up with one of the fashion students at the college, instead of just being stuck with anyone we had to choose someone who were making things which also went with the way that we each individually create are photos. In my case I tend to normally create my photos by compositing to replace the background with anything different really where you wouldn’t normally be able to shoot the photos this way it makes it seem like the subjects that I am shooting appear to look like I have taken them in that particular location. In this case with the fashion student which I had chosen to work with she had created items of clothing which were kind of to do with things like coral and the ocean etc. So for one of my final layout ideas was to composite an ocean into the background of the image to look like the dresses are floating under water.

When it came to shooting the fashion students clothing which she had made at first we decided to have a meeting about how we were going to shoot them. So after a long time of discussing about how we were going to this we both decided that instead of having the items of clothing on a model we decided to instead have them on a manikin and shoot it in the studio. There were a lot of reasons why we decided to do this on of my reasons for this was referring back to the original research which I had undertaken which was that the particular style of fashion photography which I liked which I looked at was still life fashion photography and one of the ways that this is done is by shooting the items of clothing on a manikin, so this was also an example of how I was going to shoot my images as it referred back to the original research. The other reason why we decided to shoot the clothes on a manikin was because like I mentioned before the fashion student wanted it to fit into the style of like being in the ocean etc, and this would be a lot easier by using a manikin rather than a model because we could arrange the clothes better on a manikin.

To make it seem even more realistic to have the clothes looking like they were floating in the ocean we came up with the idea by having a fan turned on in the studio as we were shooting so that it could blow the trousers dangling from the manikin which then when I shot the images would make it look like they were moving ever so slightly which worked very well with compositing the background of the ocean into one of the layouts. Another way in which that we made the trousers and shorts on the manikin look like they were moving was by setting the camera to a longer exposure time and then flashing the studio lights more than once while the camera was capturing the image. The way in which that this worked was by when the fan was blowing the clothes we were flashing the lights between which when the camera had captured the image it made it look like there was more than one set of clothes this worked more with the trousers, an example of this working would be on one of the final images chosen for the layout which would be the image with the long white trousers.

When it came to editing the photos in the adobe Photoshop cs4 program the first thing which I done was I imported the four photos which the fashion student had chosen from the shoot, then I took the poles from the manikin out of the photos as she did not want these in the final edited images to do this I first imported the image into a new Photoshop window and then got hold of the eye dropper tool and selected the base colour from the background of the image as the background was just black at first I thought that I would just select black from the colour palette on Photoshop but then I realised that when you looked very closely at the photo there was more than just one colour in the background because of the studio lights etc reflecting on the backdrop. So as soon as I had selected the colour with the eyedropper tool I then painted over the pole and this worked very well to get rid of it, I then carried out this with the other images and with a couple of them I also had to use the cropping tool as there was sometimes more than just the backdrop in the photo like for examples the walls of the photography studio.

As soon as I had finished editing the poles out of the four final images I then began to create the layouts, the first thing which I did to come up with the ideas of each layout was that I kept referring back to the research and seeing what I could do similar to the magazines which I had looked at previously. As soon as I had come up with a few ideas for layouts to make I went into Photoshop and started to put the research and my skills together to come up with the final layouts. The first thing which I done for each layout was that I imported at first all of the final images and then looked back at the research to see which images would go where, then as soon as I had an idea I started to edit the layouts. An example of one of the layouts which I created would be the one with the two items of clothing in it with the shimmery kind of shorts, the reason why I have chosen to talk about this one is because it was the first layout which I created.

The first thing which I done was that I imported the two images which I wanted to use in it and then I looked back at my research and I thought to my self which one would be best to follow and which style would work well, once I had an idea I arranged the two images onto a blank campus on Photoshop and then I selected each image and made them a lot bigger to fit each half of the campus, to keep them to the right scale without stretching them I held down “shift” on the keyboard at the same time as I made it bigger so that it wouldn’t stretch any of the pixels. The way in which that each image came together on each half of the page was very handy as each background was roughly the same colour, it looked like I had just dropped each image onto a black background this made the layout work very well. As soon as I had made the images to the right size that I wanted I then added the text to the layout which said what inspired the fashion designer to create them in the way that they did and the thing which inspired them was “open brain coral”, so to finish the layout off I then found an image of this type of coral and dropped it into the image. When I first dropped the image of the coral into the layout it looked to bright and I wanted the fashion designers clothes to be the eye-catching part of the image so to fix this I turned the opacity of the coral layer down from 100% to 55% which made it less bright so that the clothes would be the most eye-catching parts of the layout, once I had done this I was very proud of the finished layout and then I roughly used the same Photoshop tools on the other three layouts which all came out looking very nice to look at.

I can say that my finished layouts look very similar to some of the magazines which I looked at to start off with, an example of one of the finished layouts that looks quite like one of the ones that I researched would be the one with three of the fashion designers clothes featured in it with the text all around it I can say that this finished layout matches up very similar with the layout from the Skorch magazine as I have tried to set the layout out the same way with the same type of text etc. I have roughly tried to do the same thing with my other finished layouts by trying to make them similar to the ones that I looked at to start off with.

When looking back at my finished layouts I can say that I am very pleased with the overall finished look of them. The reason why I feel this way is because I feel that I have taken most of my research about fashion photography into account and feel that my finished layouts reflect very well on the research. The other reason why I am very pleased about the finished images and a layout is because my actual client who was the fashion student really liked the images both the way in which that I shot them and also by the way that I edited them and for this I am very pleased with my self.