Style Guide
OUTFIT DIRECTION AND INSPIRATION
When planning for family or couples portraits, it's best to have a strategy when working on outfits. You want everything to be cohesive and flow, as well as blend and not contrast with each other. Below you can find a few tips and tricks to help ensure everyone looks great when shooting with Jenn Ayers Photography.
Working with Patterns
The best practice when working with patterns is to pick one person to wear one. You don't want multiple people in the image wearing something distracting. This will avoid any visual competition between subjects.
Here Steve is wearing a nice patterns shirt with some jeans. Claudia's dress compliments his shirt nicely by pulling out the orange hints of the pattern.
It's easiest to start your planning around the pattern. Pick the person's outfit who will wear the loud print, and design everyone else's outfit around this!
Give me neutrals!
I can't say this enough - I LOVE NEUTRALS.
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Working with muted tones always brings the best results. Think pale yellow, greens of any shade, earthy blues, browns, tans, and oranges.
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Generally when shooting outside these colors will compliment any background without blending or competing. Here the Casey Family coordinated perfectly! Both Dad and little Junie are wearing a similar shade of blue which adds contract to the more pale/neutral shades of everyone else.
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Positioning them apart helps create visual interest as your eyes travel from one subject to the next.
Sometimes color works
I'll say it again -- I love neutrals, but...​
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Not to confuse you, but sometimes you can ignore what I said about neutrals! If you know the location, and have an idea of how something will look - sometimes bold colors will work great!
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This beautiful pink dress makes our mom-to-be here stand out among the plants here at the San Antonio Botanical Garden. Her choice to go bold helped bring her to the forefront of each photo -- and really helped that belly to pop!
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Don't be afraid of color, but when in doubt, follow the rules above.
What about a theme?
If you're celebrating something that has more of a theme, like Christmas or Valentine's Day, you can pull colors that match!
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For instance, these two went for the holiday theme for their Christmas Tree Farm shoot. While they're both wearing patterns, the. dress she is wearing is more monochromatic and works well in contrast to his red shirt. I also love the pop of white with her undershirt here!
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If you have a shoot coming up and not sure how your outfit will work, text me! I'm always happy to give guidance and advice. (713) 628-7803.