As a freelance portrait photographer in Hong Kong, I am happy to provide styling services to my clients as well, because I am aware that not everyone is used to doing outdoor photoshoots.
Plus, looking at your wardrobe and having to decide what to wear can be a hard decision to make.
In this guide, you will learn what to think about when deciding your outfit for an outdoor photoshoot, in terms of colour, fit and accessories. This will enable you to avoid garments that are hard to handle in a photoshoot, and give you the best experience and results possible.
In general, the colour of what you wear should correspond to the lighting conditions, the location and the mood. The fit of the clothes would depend on your vulnerabilities and logistical considerations on set. The accessories to be careful of include hats, glasses and hairbands.
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Why Bother about Clothing?
In general, I always ask my clients to plan ahead regarding their outfits as soon as they expressed the intention to book me for a portrait session.
As I have explained in various articles previously, your attire is going to make or break the shoot.
“Ultimate Guide to Street Portrait Photography in Hong Kong”, in which I talked about colour-matching outfits with backgrounds
“Essential Steps in Editing Urban Portraits”, in which I discussed how colour contrast is critical in creating portraits that pop.
For a more in-depth discussion in relation to how the colour in the background interacts with what you wear, refer to these two articles above.
In simple words, it is my job as a portrait photographer to guide clients in making the best artistic judgments regarding outfit and locations, which is essential in showing my clients at their best.
From a logistical standpoint, shooting outdoors means there will be limitations on what clients should wear too. These things might not be immediately apparent to people who are not used to shooting frequently, and therefore I take the active step to remind my clients about logistical issues too.
A photoshoot can be tiring if clients come in uncomfortable wear because posing and smiling for hours can be physically and emotionally exhausting.
Colour of Clothing
The first factor that you could consider is what colours to wear, which will greatly fast-track your decision-making process.
Where any of the following factors lead to conflicting results, the client’s wanted mood always comes first. The location and the lighting conditions are relatively more flexible.
Mood and Colour
By the time I book a portrait session with a client, I have already sorted out the style we are going for, which also has a role in guiding the choice of outfit.
For clients who wants to do shoots with sexy, moody or urban moods, I would recommend wearing darker colours. Shadows and tones (darker shades of colours) inherently carries more mood than brighter colours.
Similarly, where clients wish to do an outdoor shoot with a light-hearted vibe, brighter garments would serve this purpose better.
The general rule is that the more shadows and thus light contrast there is in a picture, the more mood is brought into the picture.
For example, for my shoot with Ksenia, we decided to go for an urban mood. So I had Ksenia lay out her wardrobe with the relevant colours and did some matching to come up with the final outfits.
Lighting Conditions and Colour
Think about the lighting conditions of your photoshoot, which will give you some idea of what to not wear.
When doing night portraits outside, my recommendation is to wear at least one piece that has a light, bright colour.
As you will be outdoors, though we can still add lights to the scene, artificial lighting is going to be limited and we will have to rely on ambient lights bouncing off buildings and streets.
Dark colours tend to get buried in the dark background, while lighter garments have a better ability to reflect the ambient light back to the camera. The latter combination is more able to isolate you as the subject in the photo apart from the surroundings.
Whereas if you are doing an outdoor shoot with harsh lighting, or in bright daylight in general, I would advise against wearing white clothes. White material has a high ability in reflecting light, and that can cause your clothes to blow out under direct sunlight.
On a side note, clothes with shimmers can be a saviour when shooting in low light, but a total disaster when shooting under bright light.
On overcast days, on the other hand, lighting doesn’t have much bearing on the colour of the outfit.
Background Location and Colour
Again, this is something I have been harping on over and over again because I want you guys to realise how colour is the key to making interesting portraits.
This is definitely the single most important secret sauce in my portraits - you can flick through my portfolio below, which will show you how much intent has gone into designing the colour palette for each outdoor shoot.
The simplest way to make colours work for you, is to wear the same colour as the background you will be shooting against. This colour scheme is known as analogous.
In the grid above, some photos feature neutral outfits on neutral backgrounds, pink on red, blue on cyan etc.
Another is to incorporate complementary colours, namely the pair of colours opposite each other on the colour wheel.
In the grid above, this would be the case where I used blue on yellow, red on green, orange on cyan etc.
If you want to familiarise yourself about colour schemes, read my earlier blog article “Effectively Improve Photoshop Skills for Photography Retouch”, in which I went into great detail about the science behind colour schemes.
Fit of Clothing
By the fit of what you wear, I mean things like how tight your clothes are, and the type of cutting they are made in.
Vulnerabilities and fit
Our bodies are all different, but one thing is common - we all feel vulnerable our bodies.
The only difference lies in the specific part that we do not feel confident about. And it is a good thing to recognise these vulnerabilities, so that you can take steps to dress yourself in a way that empowers you to show yourself at your best.
From the experience in my freelance photography, clients usually have a few common concerns.
One is thick upper arms. The simple solution is to wear a jacket made of more rigid materials, such as denim.
Another common vulnerability is the waist. The fix is to wear a high-waist bottom piece, which creates a horizontal line across the thinness point in the torso. This horizontal line has the effect of drawing attention to that point, and to create the impression that everything below that line belongs to the territory of legs. A side benefit of doing this is to visually elongate your legs.
The last generic concern has to do with thighs and legs. To address this, you could consider paying attention to the point at which your legs start to show. For instance, if wearing a mini skirt, that point would be at a few inches above your knees; if wearing boots, that point might be at the mid-section of your front legs; if wearing trousers, that point might be right above your ankles.
Pick clothes that cut off at the thinnest points in your limbs. Where this is varies for everyone but the general rule stays the same.
Mood and fit
Once you are confident with your body because your choice of clothing has empowered you to feel good about your body, you are now ready to decide on the mood of your photoshoot.
The relation between the mood you are going for and the fit of your garments is a rather direct one. Want to shoot a casual, homey vibe? Go for oversized clothes. Want to shoot a smouldering, have-an-attitude vibe? Go for tighter, more defining clothes.
An extra tip here is to wear loose, baggy clothes if you are shooting at a windy location. Garments flowing in the air does magic to your portraits!
Comfortability and Fit
Although as a freelance photographer I try my best to make the logistics easy for my clients so that their outdoor shoots with me are always fun, I do keep in mind certain issues with wearing uncomfortable garments.
In an outdoor location, the set is less staged. You don’t sit on blocks unlike in studio; you might be sitting on fences, floors, stairs etc. We are making the most out of what we can find at an outdoor location.
Therefore, posing can be harder as compared to a studio shoot, where the set up is perfectly optimised for getting shots of you sitting and doing all sorts of crazy poses.
In order to get natural, decent shots of my clients in a variety of poses, I make sure that what they decide to wear will enable them to at least comfortably sit outdoors. Otherwise, that discomfort will show through in the photos.
Another consideration that has to be taken into is the fact that you might need to move in between shooting locations. For arrangements in which we shoot multiple close-by locations in a day, you will have to either walk in these outfits, or carry them in a bag.
Changing is also an issue when shooting outside. Due to both time and physical constraints, you want to plan ahead to minimise the time spent on changing, and the complexity of the changes.
In general, this means staying away with super short lower-body pieces, and extremely tight garments. It also means refraining from super high heels.
Where the outfit combinations get complicated, I would advise my clients to think about the sequence of the outfits. Start with the simplest outfit, and add more layers to get the second and third looks, not the other way round.
Be smart about how you layer your outfits so as to pack as light as possible. Wear the same shirt inside if the sweaters go over it anyway. Use that same belt if the top covers it anyway.
Logistics should never come in the way of artistic direction, in my opinion. However, it is something that has to be taken care of before we can even talk about creating interesting portraits.
Accessories
Apart from clothing, I also advise clients on accessories because when worn appropriately, they can add interesting details to the styling.
Sometimes, the accessories can even be a key element in the portraits.
Be Cautious about Hats
While hats can look really cool (I personally love them too), be careful with how you wear it.
The biggest issue with hats is that they block light from hitting your face, which will cast a shadow halfway across your face or your neck depending on the time and weather of the day.
Who wants a portrait of themselves that has their faces buried in dark shadows? So if you are to wear a hat, work with your photographer to adjust the angle of the light and the camera, so that your face is adequately lit.
Hairbands
Depending on your aesthetics (ladies), wearing your hairband when having your hair untied might feel like a cool idea.
But from the perspective of how photos turn out, most likely they are not. It creates this awkward juncture in the hand because hairbands are usually black, which is very apparent when placed against the human skin tone.
The real issue with hairbands is that they don’t add any value to the outfit.
I would advise you to get rid of those altogether.
Glasses
Most clients I have shot take off their glasses and come to the shoot with contact lenses. Some however insist on being photographed with glasses on.
That is perfectly fine, as a photographer I work around my client’s requests. Also, some people deliberately bring a pair of glasses that are fake just to add an extra look to the set of photos.
When shooting with glasses, extra care is required to avoid lens glare. Again, work with your photographer to adjust the position of the glasses, and source of light hitting it and the angle of the camera.
This will take some trial and error, but it will be worth the effort in order to get artistic and clean photos.
Summary
In this article, we talked about what to wear to an outdoor photoshoot in terms of the following:
Colour of clothing, which is decided based on the mood, lighting conditions and shoot location;
Fit of clothing, which depends on personal vulnerabilities, mood and logistic considerations; and
Accessories, which require special attention when it comes to hats, hair bands and glasses.
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