How To Build a Fashion Photography Portfolio From Scratch

Many photographers dream of shooting fashion. They dream of working for brands they love, and travelling the world to do what they love. But in order to do all of that, you need to have a beautiful, impactful portfolio of fashion photography to get you there! And that can seem like a very daunting task. Where do you even start? Well, hopefully this blog post will give you an outline of the steps that you can take to get you where you want to be.

Before You Shoot, Plan.

Before you even begin shooting for your portfolio, I encourage you to plan. What do you want your portfolio to do for you? Where do you want to take your career? What kinds of brands do you want to shoot for? Or what magazines inspire you the most? Look at your list, and then write down some key words that describe who you are going to be as a fashion photographer. Example: I want to shoot for magazines like Harpers Bazaar and Conde Nast Traveller Magazine. My work is romantic, and bohemian, with an other world quality to it. I encourage you to take some time on this, and go into as much detail as you can. Write as many words that describe what you’d like your portfolio to look like as you can.

Gather Inspiration

Once you’ve got your key words and your lists of who you’d like to shoot for, you need to gather inspiration. Get on Pinterest, or grab a bunch of magazines and a notebook and collate images that feel like they speak to you. Don’t over think this too much, because you can refine it if you need to. And don’t limit yourself to just fashion imagery. In fact, I encourage you to seek inspiration outside of fashion photography as much as you can, to diversify your eye. I take a lot of inspiration for my work from paintings. You want this collection of inspiration to be your “go to” for whenever you need to come up with ideas. I like to think of it like my “ideas well” - I can dip into it whenever I need to come back to myself, and reconnect with what inspires me. Feel free to add to it as much as you like, remove anything that you don’t connect with anymore, and highlight the images which are really standing out to you the most.

Make Moodboards

Once you’ve gathered all of your inspiration, you may have already had a great shoot ideas. Now is the time to grab a few of those initial ideas, and make mood boards for them, In case you’ve never heard of a mood board before, all a mood board is is a collection of inspirational images that you use as a starting point for any editorial you do. Every creative project will have one, and your mood board can be made up of as many or as few images as you like, and they can be from all sorts of mediums. Here is an example of one of my own mood boards from an old shoot.

BONUS TIP: Include key words to describe the mood and emotion that you want your shoot to give off.

Plan Your First Shoot

Once you’ve got a few moodboards made up with more specific ideas, it’s time to grab one of them, and g o with it. You need to plan it in much more depth! Start thinking about who you might want to involve. If you’ve never shot fashion before, you might want to keep things simple to start with, and just shoot with a model. A model could be a friend of yours, or you could search on Instagram for a model as well. Top tip: use the hashtags #YOURLOCATIONmodel to see who models in your local area. If you are an experienced photographer with a few years of shooting portraits or weddings behind you, there is nothing stopping you from putting together a selection of your best images, and contacting some of your local modelling agencies to see if they have any models who could test with you. “Testing” in the fashion world simply means that everyone on the shoot works for free - the model and yourself both shoot to gain images for your portfolio.

Once You’ve Done One, Build On That

The first one is always the hardest, so once you’ve done that, move onto the next. The most important thing about building a fashion portfolio is to keep momentum going, to keep shooting and to keep learning. You will learn more whilst shooting than you ever would be reading or watching Youtube videos, so get out there! I encourage you to plan 1 or 2 creative shoots for your portfolio each month. That is the quickest way to build a solid fashion portfolio.

Contact Teams

Fashion photography is, at its core, team work. You’ll need other people around you to succeed at your best. So once you’ve got one or two shoots under your belt that you can show your talent with, reach out to some local hair and make up artists, and ask them if they’d be willing to collaborate with you on any future shoot ideas you have. Make up artists and hair stylists always need new content to promote their businesses on social media, and most of them adore the chance to get involved with shoots because it allows them to get creative! So don’t think that they won’t want to hear from you, because the chances are they will.

Think About The Clothes

My final point may seem obvious to some of you, but it often gets forgotten - make sure you focus on the clothing. Fashion photography is about selling fashion, so the clothes in your images need to look their very best. When you’re shooting, keep thinking to yourself “Does this dress look at it’s best right now?” Always think about how you could showcase a garment really well. Does it look best with movement? Does it need to be resteamed? Does it need to be pinned back to fit the model better? Stylists are the ones who will generally do this hard work for you, but if you don’t have one on set with you (and even if you do!) you should still always be paying attention to how the clothes are looking. This will make you stand out far more as a professional.

Know That Your Portfolio Is Fluid

Your portfolio is never “done.” That is one of the beauties of this work, we always have something else to do. You’ll always be learning, you’ll always be finding inspiration in new places. You’ll always want to better yourself. It’s about finding a balance between being happy with the work you produce, but also knowing that there is room to improve. Learn to enjoy the process of building a fashion photography portfolio, and you’ll always be winning.