What do you need to shoot fashion? I don’t know if there is a good answer to this. Fashion is such a huge and diverse industry and depending on what level you are operating, it requires different approaches. Ultimately fashion is about selling the product. Your job is to create imagery that will do that. How that ends up happening is dependant upon the client and their methods. The best are the ones who hire you because you are you and they trust you to bring your vision to the fore and let you do that. They’re willing to take risks and develop a campaign around your style. Those are rare.
What most photographers starting out will discover is that you are good enough to shoot for a client, but you are expected to hit a predetermined mark with less resources and time than is required. You’ll have a sales team that has very strong opinions about what you do and they are opinions strongly entrenched in the way things have always been done. They may say they want you to “be you” but at the end of the day, that may not be the case. Then it becomes the dance. You listen to what they say they want and then figure out what they really want. Ideally you can end up shooting both and push them, but nearly all of the images you see here, which are my favorites, never ran. The sales teams overrode the owner and they ran with the safest of work. The best campaign I think I ever shot was the oilgraphed bridal campaign. The owners loved it, the buyers called, the sales team rebelled. One quit. It didn’t matter that it was their most successful campaign. Once my contact retired I never heard from them again. They went back to safe and most of it never saw print.
When I am shooting the personal portrait work it’s just me and the subject and it’s all about the conversation. I don’t like having anybody else around. It’s too intimate. On a fashion set, having a team is what works the best. I’m not a controller and if my assistant or anybody else suggests something that works, then I’m all for it. It’s not about me, it’s about the job. But you have to be careful. If you allow for too much dialogue then there’s too many cooks. I like to shoot organically so there’s nothing worse than when you are working with a model and that beautiful tango of shooting begins and you have the client behind you suddenly yell, “Your hand! Do this with it…” I learned long ago to never let the hair and make-up team see the first test snips back from the lab.