How to Photograph & Create The Perfect Fashion Lookbook

If you have just ventured into the fashion photography industry, there is one thing you need to know – how to photograph the perfect fashion lookbook.

- Nityapriya Kaliyath

Regardless of their size and scale, fashion brands usually create a lookbook to entice their customers with styles pictures of their product. This provides aspiring fashion photographers a wonderful opportunity to step into the industry. Shooting fashion lookbooks has double benefits for every photographer – it allows you to cement your mark as a fashion photographer commercially while helping you build your portfolio.

But before we begin talking about how to shoot the perfect fashion lookbook, let’s take a look at what a lookbook actually is!

A brief Look into Lookbooks

Lookbook is a catalogue of high quality stylised images that show the items in a fashion designer’s collection. Simply put, lookbook is a set of pictures of fully-styled looks in life settings created with the brands products – whether it’s apparel, accessories or even make-up.

Brands usually create a lookbook to persuade their customers to buy their products. Lookbooks show how the products of a brand can be put together to create a complete “look”.

In the fashion industry, a lookbook is highly valuable as it highlights the personality of the brand due its creative and style-inspiring content. Unlike a fashion catalogue, a lookbook doesn’t feature the product against a plain background of a studio. Instead, it comprises of photographs of models flaunting the products in backdrops from real life. Thus, photographs from the look book are often used to engage audience on social media as the real-life setting and stylised look garners a lot of attention from prospective customers.