Turning Inspiration Into A Concept
Hey FashionPhotographyBlog.com readers.
Thanks for joining us on our Concept to Creation series where we walk you through the process of taking an idea into an image. If you were with us last time, we talked about talked about how to find inspiration for your shoots. On today’s we’re going to jump into discussing how to turn your inspiration into a concept.
Now, this right here is the most important step. You have an idea, great. How do you turn that idea into a set of images? Can it be turned into a picture narrative/story? Now that you have your base idea, it’s time to do some research! Doing an editorial based on the color red? What does the color red evoke? How have people pulled off red editorials in the past? While researching, plan your shoot. Is it in studio? Is it on location? One model or two? Blonde, brunette or redhead? Take this laundry list of ideas and findings and start turning it into a picture in your head.
For some people, it helps to sketch things out. For others, it helps to collage. I tend to collect images while I sit on an idea and then go straight into creating a moodboard.
Look at an editorial or a campaign, you’ll see that there is one main thing that binds all the images together – a concept. When flipping through the pages of a magazine, you can determine when one story ends and another beings purely based on the concept behind the images. You won’t find an editorial that consists of different girls wearing different types of clothing in locations that aren’t relevant to each other. That’s just not how it works.
A concept is what will bind your story together. And the way in which you handle it shows a bit of your voice. A concept goes further than “my model is wearing red in all the images”. That’s purely a way of styling the model. Put some imagination into it.
Hope you all enjoyed this dive into the thought process behind translating an inspiration into a concept. To help explain the points raised in this post further, the next article I’m posting, we’ll dive a little further by showing you some examples of how working fashion editorial photographers pull their inspiration and translating them into concepts.
Until then –
Alana
IMAGE SOURCE:
Feature image & image 1: Miles Aldridge for Vogue Italia
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Concept To Creation: How Professional Photographers Do It Examples of Concept to Creation from Working Fashion Photographers
Concept To Creation: Finding Inspiration We’re going to look at something a bit more conceptual. I can give advice and guide you, but ultimately it’s your job to really dig in and put it all together.
Concept To Creation: Editorial Versus Campaign Concept – crucial to binding your images together. You’ll find that any high end magazine only published editorials that has a concept holding the story together so today we are going discuss the difference between editorial and campaign images and how these can affect the concept for your shoots.
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