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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How hues appeal
Red stands for intense emotions, yellow for happiness, blue implies trust and calmness, green is the colour of nature and health, orange associates with warmth and positivity, while purple is the colour of luxury and mystery – and then there are the non-colours white, which stands for pureness, and black, which symbolises quality, power and death. The psychological impact of colours on human minds is powerful and evidently influencing our feelings towards things, which again influences our buying behaviour. It’s almost that simple, but of course, there is more to it, like e.g. the season and current colour trends. When you plan your next campaign and you want to have a photoshoot for it, it’s worth taking a closer look at what colours are going to be in the pictures, aside from the hues of your collection. It might allow you to have a distinct impact on your future sales numbers. Getting curious about colours now? Here are five factors whereby choosing the right background, styling, and make-up colours gets easier for you.
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How perspectives appeal
Creating campaigns or other images to promote your fashion label means that you are speculating on which visual language your costumers understand and act on. In order to stay true to your brand’s philosophy and to be seen as authentic, it’s likely to incarnate all characteristics that you want to communicate with the help of the perfect model. But not only is her or his attitude crucial, but the way how the model is photographed can cause different effects too. When you watch a movie, the points of view create different feelings towards the shown person, object, or scene. Human imagination is a very strong tool to encode messages in pictures, which not only applies to moving-images. You just have to press the right buttons. Therefore this article explains the effects of different perspectives in order to give you an idea of your options and the involved power you have with them. To revisit the movie topic, when you’re aiming for a story-telling kind of photo series, perspectives and cuts should vary. But when it comes to a lookbook or online shop images, it’s more common to shoot all images very even. Of course, you can turn the tables and do it intentionally different, because this way your photos (or your website) might be more eye-catching. It’s up to you to decide if your brand should be quite offbeat or rather classic and the following paragraphs might help you find out which perspectives you like best for that purpose.
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How outdoor locations appeal
Does your fashion label need new photography in order to show the brand-new collection of yours? I’m happy to give you some tips on how to plan and realize it. You might have read my last article with lots of indoor location inspiration and how places appeal to the viewers’ eyes. Now it’s time for part no. 2 treating the possibilities of shooting outdoors. As I mentioned in my tip no. 4, there’s a list of questions you might want to ask yourself before deciding to situate your images under the open sky. If you have the right solutions to all those upcoming “problems” and you’re still eager to plan your production open-air you are welcome to soak all my following ideas in and eventually choose one of them for your very campaign. Me personally, I’m a great fan of any outdoor shooting theme, because a real existing place can look very authentic plus, when lucky with the weather, daylight can be very favorable for any kind of photography. One thing you should probably know is the fact that the midday sun is usually too strong for taking good-looking pictures. So in the best case, there are many shady spots to use for the time between 12 am and 3 pm. If there aren’t be prepared for your photographer suggesting some uncivilized hours to start the production, so he or she can benefit from the morning light. After a long lunch break, the afternoon sun will do the rest. To be able to make use of the noontime as well, there’s another possibility: you will need a diffuser to smoothen the light and either is it given through a cloudy sky, which is the best weather for shootings by the way, or the team uses a big canvas instead (but beware of the wind!) However, before I’m talking too technically, let’s go on to the location samples. Enjoy!
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