Shooting your outfits on a phone: eight rules
Enough to produce sellable images with no equipment, no studio and no software. Light does almost all the work.
People think you need a camera. You need light, a calm background and a second pair of hands — and all three are free. Here is what genuinely changes the result, in order of importance.
1. The window, never the ceiling light
Stand facing a window, one or two metres away. Daylight is soft, even and renders colours truthfully — the ceiling light yellows everything and digs shadows under the eyes. Switch off every indoor light, even during the day: mixing two sources gives tints you cannot correct.
2. Not midday, not full sun
Outdoors, direct sun flattens fabrics and burns out whites. Look for the shade of a wall or a tree, or shoot early morning and late afternoon. An overcast sky is free studio lighting.
3. A background that says nothing
A plain wall, a door, a drawn curtain. Anything lying around in frame steals attention from the piece. When in doubt: step back, turn round, find the emptiest wall in the house.
4. Phone height
For a full-length shot the phone belongs at your waist height, not at face height. Shot from above, a body is foreshortened and the legs disappear. It is the most common mistake and the easiest to fix.
5. Self-timer rather than outstretched arm
Put the phone down, set the timer to ten seconds, take several shots. You will get natural poses and the frame will stay straight. A stack of books stands in for a tripod.
6. Lock the focus
Press and hold on the garment on screen: focus and exposure lock onto it. Without that, the phone exposes for the background and underexposes the piece — especially in front of a window.
7. The detail, always
For every outfit, take one close-up: the fabric, a seam, a button, the way the cloth falls. It is the image that answers the question everyone asks online and that no product page answers.
8. Edit lightly
A little brightness, a little contrast, and that is all. Colour filters change the colour of the garment — and a customer who receives a piece in a different colour from your photo sends it back. A returned order cancels your commission.
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- A clothes peg: it takes in a garment at the back and fixes a cut for the length of the shot.
- A sheet of white card: on the floor facing the window, it bounces light back and erases shadows under the chin.
- A microfibre cloth: a phone lens is always greasy, and that is the first cause of a blurred photo.
A good phone photo is good light. Everything else is secondary.See the creator media kit