How to be an Insta-Good Photographer At Fashion Shows

Joe Zee
·Editor in Chief
Updated

Photo Courtesy of Trunk Archive

Fashion Week is the perfect opportunity to use social media—especially Instagram—to see all the action from inside the tents, or to share what you’re seeing with people who can’t be there with you. But it’s also one of the hardest times to get noticed in an Instagram scroll: more often than not, your feed is flooded with blurry models, badly-lit presentations, and red-eye-filled party shots. Oh, and everyone takes the exact. same. pic. So here’s my primer on how you can stand out from the amateur Insta-Pack.

1. Zoom: There’s nothing more disappointing than a picture taken from the 5th row. While we all can’t have front-row seats, we all do have a zoom feature on our phones. Use it, either before taking the picture or before posting it. Give those back-of-heads a rest.

2. Clean Your Phone: You probably keep your phone in your bag or your pocket, and it might look clean to you, but make sure. You don’t want a fingerprint or a smudge to get in the way of a clear, crisp photo.

3. Look To The Left (Or Right): If you follow a lot of fashion accounts on Insta, chances are you are seeing a lot of the same pictures every time a show is happening. Why not try taking a shot of something else? When you have an urge to take a photo of something on the runway, look to the left or to the right and you just might see a person or an angle no one else is seeing.

4. Regram: If you can’t get a good picture during the shows, someone else (with a better seat? A newer phone?) probably did. Go through your feed and regram them (using Regram app or just a straight-up screen grab) but do the right thing and give the actual photog the credit.

5. Do The Proper Post-Production: Sometimes just having an OK-to-good picture isn’t enough. The trick is to alter them through additional filters—and I don’t mean Valencia. Instead, try using Afterlight, Camera Pro+ or even Facetune; they do everything from adding sharpness and light leaks to overlaying special effects, a beauty blur, or generally tweaking the ambience of a photo before you post it. You’ll be AMAZED at what you can do in an app. That extra effort will make your pic the one everyone likes. And nothing feed the soul quite like a “like,” am I right?