Building a Lookbook on a Small Budget
By The Velocity Wear Team
You need one location, decent daylight, two hours, a shot list written before anyone arrives, and a steamer. Spend your money on the person operating the camera rather than the camera itself, and on garment preparation rather than post-production. A cheap lookbook looks cheap because of creases, bad fit and aimless shooting, almost never because of the sensor.
Decide What The Lookbook Has To Do
A lookbook is not a product catalogue. Product shots sell a specific item to somebody who has already decided to buy; a lookbook sells the idea of the brand to somebody who has not. The two need different pictures, and trying to make one shoot do both is why so many small-brand galleries feel muddled.
Be honest about where the images will end up. If ninety per cent of the use is a phone screen in a vertical crop, shoot for that crop and treat the wide landscape hero as a bonus. Framing for a printed spread you will never print is a common and expensive habit.
One Location, Chosen For Light Not Looks
Interesting backgrounds are cheap; good light is not. A plain wall in open shade beats a beautiful location in hard midday sun every time. Look for north-facing windows, the shaded side of a building, a car park under overcast cloud, an underpass with an open end. Overcast days are a gift and most people waste them waiting for sunshine.
Moving between locations eats your two hours. One spot with three usable angles gives you more finished images than four spots with travel between them, and it keeps the light consistent so the set hangs together as a collection rather than a scrapbook.
Borrow The Skill, Not The Kit
A photography student with a mid-range body and one fast prime will out-shoot an expensive camera in untrained hands, and will cost a fraction of a commercial day rate. Offer a fair fee, credit and usage terms in writing, and be specific about what you need rather than asking them to be creative in a vacuum. Renting a body you cannot operate is money set on fire.
The Kit That Actually Changes The Pictures
- A handheld steamer. Fold creases from the delivery box are the number one giveaway of an amateur shoot, and no amount of editing removes them convincingly.
- A pack of bulldog clips or clothes pegs to pull garments taut at the back so the front hangs clean on camera.
- A large white or silver reflector, or a foam board from a craft shop, to fill shadow on the shaded side of a face.
- A lint roller. Dark garments and freshly printed transfers attract fibres that show up brutally at full resolution.
- Two or three spare garments in the same design purely as shoot stock, because pinned and clipped pieces do not go back into saleable inventory.
Write The Shot List First
Turn up with a numbered list and tick it off. A workable minimum per garment is a full-length front, a three-quarter, a torso crop that shows the print at true scale against a body, a detail of the decoration or the cuff, and one loose candid frame with movement in it. That is five images per piece, which for a small drop is very achievable in two hours.
The torso crop is the one people forget and the one that sells. Customers want to know how big the chest print actually is relative to a human being, and a full-length shot viewed at phone size cannot answer that.
Casting And Fit On A Small Budget
Friends and customers photograph better than reluctant agency models on this budget, provided you pick people who are comfortable being looked at. Cast across the size range you actually sell rather than one body shape, because a gallery where every image shows the same silhouette tells the majority of your customers nothing useful about fit.
Have people arrive in their own bottoms and shoes in neutral colours, and check that nobody is wearing a competing logo. Get a short written permission covering where and for how long you will use the images, and keep it on file.
“"Nobody has ever looked at a lookbook and thought the camera was cheap. They notice the creases immediately."”
Shoot The Product Honestly
Resist the urge to make a 280 GSM tee look like something it is not. If the fabric is light and drapey, shoot it drapey. Over-styled images set an expectation the parcel cannot meet, and the returns and the disappointed messages cost more than the extra clicks were worth. Photograph the true colour under neutral light and correct any colour cast in editing rather than pushing the saturation for effect.
Delivering It
A lookbook does not have to be a downloadable PDF that nobody opens. A single scrolling page on your own site, plus a set of vertical crops for social and a compressed PDF for anyone asking about wholesale, covers every use. Name and number the files properly on the day of the shoot, because six months later you will need the back detail of one specific colourway and you will not remember which folder it lives in.