P#11 Q1B: Avoiding the Biggest Fashion Photography Mistake

An Interesting Perspective

Bruce Smith: I'm always trying to improve the pictures I'm taking. I'm always trying to make people look at my pictures for more than one second.

When I'm teaching my students to shoot fashion pictures, I explain to them, "Look, people look at pictures all the time. Thousands and thousands and thousands of images every single day without being conscious of it."

You may spend a fraction of a second looking at an image that you see. You see people looking at pages of a magazine -- they'll turn the pages very, very quickly. If you can stop them in their tracks and make them look at one image for two seconds as against one second, that's 100% improvement. That's what I try to tell myself when I'm shooting.

When shooting fashion photography, I take all of the information from my clients and I interpret that and add my input to it. But I also try to ask myself how I'm going to make people look at this picture for more than one second. Two seconds is very successful against one second. Five seconds or ten seconds is a miracle.

Every Second Counts

This is how I keep improving myself. I keep saying to myself, "I have to get more out of the picture." I have to get more people to look at the pictures for longer periods of time. This is very important if you are a commercial photographer.

It doesn't matter what you're shooting, still life or product shots or fashion pictures or whatever it is. If you can make people look at your pictures for longer, you've achieved something that has actually got viability to potential clients.

Library pictures, for instance. A library picture can be a flower or it can be a person or it could be almost anything. Looking through a catalog -- if the pictures that you've taken in a mail-order catalog stop the person and make them look at the things that are actually on the pages, they're more likely going to buy those things.

If you can get people to look at the pictures longer, they're going to be interested in those things. They might even want to go further and look at more items or more details of the actual garments that are on the page.

In commercial fashion photography, getting people to look at pictures longer is like encouraging them to buy. For my clients, that's a very important factor.

In Conclusion

Want your picture to make a statement (or sell a product)? You need to get people to look at your pictures longer. According to fashion photography expert Bruce Smith, the best way to do that is to ask yourself what you can do to get people interested in your picture -- what can you do to make them stay two seconds or longer?