Tip 22 for Better Shoots by Heidi Rondak

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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Tip 20 for Better Shoots by Heidi Rondak

How to get inspired for a campaign shoot

The last three tip articles have revealed to us who is needed to execute a photo shoot successfully. Now, as we know that we’re dealing with a team of at least 4 people (a photographer, a model, a hair & make-up artist and a fashion stylist) we want to make sure that everyone shares the same vision of what is going to be produced so that they can do their best in their fields. Therefore, this article and the following two are going to treat the most important puzzle piece of any photo shoot: the concept and its making.
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The Most Powerful Tool of a Photographer

This little sentence has always been the best advice and guideline for me, definitely. I belong to those people who develop an immediate passion for things they see and find beautiful. When I get inspired I also get quite excited visualising new ideas. There is so much aesthetic around everywhere, so I’m always collecting details passively. Then I get curious and start making inquiries that create more ideas. The list in my head has no end for sure. When I was studying my professors always told me to dismiss everything unnecessary from my drafts. I always got frustrated, because I loved my ideas and I wanted to add too many of them to one single project. But I knew that they were right and they had years-long experience in what they did. So I reluctantly took their advice realising every time, that the result was better than before. With every new student project, I more and more learned how to decide by myself what to drop from my layouts, movies, or photos because I trained my vision to good and effective designs and compositions.
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Cinematic Homage to Romy Schneider

Fashion editorial ROMY exists in two different versions which are for both print and digital media. One version consists of photographs while the other one is made of animated GIFs. The latter adds up to an innovative storyboard taking the term moving image upon its actual meaning. The GIF version contains landscape formats only, according to the format of movie screens. In every image, a certain element moves constantly while the rest of it is frozen. The photographic version follows the same plot.
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Modern Bacchanalia aka. YOLO

Fashion photography is, on purpose or as a side effect, soever advertising. It shows a product that the customer is supposed to desire because he likes the impression of the picture. The AIDA principle is determinative of everything concerning advertisement: ATTENTION (somebody’s attention is engaged) – INTEREST (he or she is interested) – DESIRE (the customer desires the product) – ACTION (the customer buys it) The logical follow-up goal is winning costumers for future purchases too. Therefore brands create master plans for labels that are designed to elicit the sympathy of costumers.
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The Beauty in Typography

Typography is the supreme discipline in the field of design that concerns the direct communication of things to a viewer or reader. Contentual coherences are plotted by the use of letters forming words. They are perceived as many little pictures. The typeface subtly promotes the content of the text, though it keeps fading into the background. The typeset, grey levels, and white spaces define where to look first and last at a text design – stroke width, serifs, font style, and size emphasise the statement. Although typography shows a great diversity in classifications, it all together pursues the objective of conciseness.
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Travelling in Time

Humans and machines can connect and interact through interactive media. It starts with a simple app right up to complex installations that seem futuristic to us. The development of such media has not yet grown up, but there is a high potential provided for the future’s design. Even though we are living in the age of rapid transition, those developments cause mixed feelings: sensations of freedom & restriction, interconnectedness & loneliness, the power of control & the ignorance of where this leads to are all there at the same time.
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A Line is a Travelling Dot

Nude drawings and fashion photography equally address the human figure and its shapes that get formed solid by light. They are snapshots of short instants, a documentation of the current condition, that will pass soon. With fashion photography, it’s moreover the current zeitgeist to be captured by photo. Especially today drawings are located between art and design. Old printing techniques like etching or letterpress can be stylistic devices at the designer’s work, but in these digital ages they are not a necessary part anymore, so they may be classified as art. Still, we love handmade things. It’s individual, unique, precious, and made with love for detail. For the designer of handmade things, as for the photographer producing pictures in a photo lab, it means more creative freedom and a greater, but also more obvious effort. We all identify with hand creature better because we ourselves feel special and unique, as well as we feel transient.
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The Story Behind THE ESSENCE

Brands generate a completed feeling by a whole lot of well-defined details. Apart from the obvious, such as the visual identity or design, they use connotations triggered by colour, haptic, slogans, etc. Branding means boiling it down to the essential – not more and not less – which helps the costumer have faith and not getting confused. Brands refine constantly and operate after the principle of being both compelling and fascinating.
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