Let your mood board undergo a reality check
Following the guidelines of my last tip, your mood board may by now be ready to be seen by others. At this point, always be careful with the copyrights of the mood material because sharing will be a form of publication for which you actually need a license of each copyright holder and the models shown (and on top of that the legal prerequisites are different in every country). In order to be on the complete safe side here, you can find a good range of useful creative commons photos on stock photo platforms some of which even offer images for free, e.g. Unsplash, Pexels, or pixabay. If you’re seeking even more professional content that was for example published in fashion magazines earlier, you can find a good variety on gettyimages, however, you’ll need to invest a bit of cash in it. Besides the copyright aspect, this article treats a few further stages where you’ll be able to touch up the mood board and make it a masterpiece.
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Mastering the art of mood board creation
After reading the last article’s advice you might be eager to finally learn how to create a mood board by yourself, according to your own shooting idea. Ultimately, it’s the most creative part in a campaign shoot and it secretly makes you the true artist. Yet, for some, it might not be clear what a mood board is exactly, let alone what to consider a good versus a great mood board. By definition, mood boards can be different kinds of presentations that combine images, text, etc. on a topic to convey a feeling about it. Such a mood board can serve as a script that, at first, wins over a good photo team and then functions like a briefing that everybody draws on during the preparation and the production day. Therefore, mood boards are communication tools and a superior one clearly distinguishes which pictures are describing what elements of the photo shoot resp. which guidelines are who’s cup of tea. After all, you certainly want to avoid that the hair & make-up artist styles a model after a mood picture that was actually just there to characterise the light situation you wanted.
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The value of natural light for your campaign photos
Welcome to part three of my tips for better campaign shoots. After discussing a few fundamentals and the effects of different visual factors on your imagery in the first two parts of this guide, we go ahead with what you must know about light to be able to decide and communicate exactly what you want for your photos – first of all to the photographer that you work with. Why is this important? Because photography is basically just like a painting done by light. The direction, intensity, and kind of light used are determining how an image, and therefore your fashion will look like. Of course, you don’t actually need to know how flashlights function. But if you’re aware of how light can create the mood of your choice, you’re far ahead of many others and the outcome of your shoot will much more look like your previous vision of it. Agree? Great, so then let’s talk about the usage of daylight, flashlight, continuous light and their performance, handling, and the possibilities of shaping it within the next four articles. Today’s article is covering everything worth knowing about daylight and why you might want to use it for your images.
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