Fashion & E-commerce Photography in Belgium

A lookbook is not a one-off purchase. Every new collection is a new shoot, which makes it the most repeatable job in fashion photography — and that changes how the first one should be planned. Framing, light and treatment are decided in the first season so the second and third can match them. A brand that does this accumulates a visual archive; a brand that books a different photographer each season accumulates a folder of unrelated seasons. What decides whether a shooting day works is settled before it starts: how many looks, how many changes per look, studio or location, and who is handling styling and hair. These four answers determine whether the agreed number of finished images is comfortable or impossible. They are worth an email at briefing rather than a discovery at three in the afternoon. Models, stylist, hair and makeup and location fees are arranged separately and billed at cost. That is deliberate. You see what each element of the production actually costs instead of paying a single number with someone else's margin inside it, and you can cut or upgrade any one of them without renegotiating the whole shoot. A twelve-month campaign licence is included, covering your website, social media and paid media. In fashion, advertising is the normal use of the images rather than the exception — a quote that leaves it out is not cheaper, it is incomplete.

Ghost mannequin photography shows the shape of a garment without a person interpreting it. For an online shop that is a returns question before it is an aesthetic one: the customer sees how the item actually sits, not how it sits on one particular body. It is also faster and less expensive than a model production, which starts to matter as soon as a collection runs to several dozen pieces. Consistency is the real deliverable. Eighty garments photographed across three days have to look photographed in one hour — same height in frame, same white, same shadow, same crop. That is set once as a template and applied to the whole set. It is the difference between a catalogue and a folder of photographs, and it is invisible until one listing is slightly off and the page looks amateur. On artificial intelligence, the honest answer rather than the defensive one: this is one of the categories under genuine pressure, and forecasts point to a large share of clothing listings using generated imagery. Two things do not change. A generated image still starts from a real garment photographed properly, and returns are driven by the gap between the image and the parcel. A shop that generates too far from the original does not save money — it moves the cost from photography to logistics. Garments arrive prepared or basic preparation is handled on site; heavily creased or structured pieces are worth a dresser, arranged at cost.

Beauty photography takes about as long to shoot as a portrait and several times as long to finish. That is the whole economics of it, and it is worth stating plainly rather than hiding behind the word "premium". A beauty image is examined at full size — skin, texture, the edge of a lash line, the transition of a shade — and everything that a portrait can leave alone has to hold up under that inspection. For a makeup artist or an agency, the image is the evidence. It has to show the work, not the retouching, which is a narrower target than it sounds: too little finishing and the frame looks unfinished, too much and the artist's work disappears into a smoothed surface. The line between those is the actual skill being paid for. For a cosmetics brand, the deliverable is colour. If a shade photographs half a tone off, the image is unusable no matter how good it looks, so colour-critical work is checked against the physical product rather than judged on a screen. This is also the honest answer on generated imagery: an approximately correct shade is not an aesthetic preference, it is a returned parcel and a complaint about the product itself. Makeup artist and model are arranged separately and billed at cost, whether you bring your own or ask us to find them.

A test portfolio exists to show what a model looks like. That single sentence decides everything else about how the session is run. Heavy retouching defeats its only purpose: an agency that books from an over-processed book and meets a different face at the casting stops trusting the photographer, and the model pays for that. So the session splits in two. The digitals — front, profile, back, full length — are delivered as they are, unretouched, because that is the point of them. A small, fixed number of frames is then finished cleanly for the book itself. Fixing that number in advance is not a limitation, it is what keeps the work honest and the turnaround short. Two or three looks fit comfortably in a short session, which is what a test needs. More looks produce a book that says less, not more — scouts scroll, they do not study, and a book of forty images is read as indecision. Both agencies and models book this directly: agencies for new faces, models to update a book before a season. Delivery is fast by design, because a casting deadline does not move to suit a retoucher.

Editorial is the part of fashion photography with a narrative. A lookbook shows the garment; an editorial shows a situation the garment belongs to, shot on location, with a point of view that survives being printed next to someone else's. It is the format magazines publish, which is why it is also the format that demonstrates art direction rather than describing it. Work of mine in this format has been published in five magazines — MALVIE, 17.23, Trend Privé twice, and Shuba. That matters less as a credential than as a check you can run yourself: an editorial page is judged by an outside editor with nothing invested in the outcome, which is a harder filter than a portfolio a photographer curates. For a clothing brand, editorial does a job that catalogue images cannot. It gives the brand a register — a street, a light, a kind of person — that carries across a season and gives paid social something other than product on white. For an agency, it is how a model's book stops looking like a series of tests. Sessions are billed by the hour with a minimum, because the work varies too much to package honestly: three hours in one street is a different job from three hours across three locations with changes. The hourly structure keeps the variation visible instead of hiding it behind a vague starting price.