“What should we wear for pictures?”
Coordinate, but not matchy-matchy.
The easiest way to do this is to start with a basic color palette. It can help to pick one person who can carry the colors or pattern in their clothing and pull colors and patterns from that for everyone else's outfits.
- Consider solid colors or faint patterns. Busy, loud patterns or logos tend to draw too much attention to the outfit.
- Try to avoid wearing all white or fluorescent colors. It tends to be distracting and the colors can reflect on your face. Wearing a vest or jacket over a white shirt helps break it up and is fine.
- Textures and layers always look amazing. Knits, scarves and sweaters for the fall and winter portraits are great on camera!
- Ladies – make sure if you are wearing a summer dress or a tank top, to wear a strapless bra! Nobody wants to see bra straps in their pictures.
- IRON your clothing! I can’t stress this enough. Every detail will show up in your portraits, so be sure to iron out any wrinkles.
- Men – Be clean-shaven or beards and mustaches trimmed. For clean-shaven guys, you may think a little stubble won’t be seen on camera, but it totally shows in close-ups, so spend the extra time to shave and put on your “handsome look”!
- Don’t over-do the makeup or accessories. No sunglasses.
- If you wear eye glasses all the time, feel free to bring them, but if you can do without your glasses or have contact lenses, this is a better option. Eyeglasses sometimes reflect images and light. If you have no other options and need your eye glasses, don’t worry!
- If you need a hair cut, make sure you schedule an appointment about a week before your photo session. You want to give the cut time to relax.
For groups:
- Everyone should dress in a similar-style, for example: All casual or all formal.
- Shirts and dress colors should be within the same color palette or be complimentary colors, rather than everyone in identical colors. Identical colors tend to look too matchy.
- Women’s clothing is more colorful than men’s clothing. Consider the guys in more neutral colors and gals in brighter colors.
Some of my favorite places to look for inspiration are Gap, H&M, Banana Republic, and j. crew.
Contact me if you have any questions and remember you can always bring more than one outfit to your session if you need some help with selecting!
Photo credit Chantel Cherie Photography
Photo credit Chantel Cherie Photography
some of the information was gathered from paint the moon.
