Shooting a boutique lookbook in your own shop after closing

Plan the run of looks before you plan the pictures

A lookbook is a sequence, not a gallery. Lay the season out on a rail in the order you intend to shoot it and walk the rail once. You are looking for a progression that makes sense to somebody who has never seen the collection: light to dark, or day to evening, or casual through to the two occasion pieces. If the rail reads as a story when you walk it, the finished set will too.

Cut ruthlessly at this stage. Ten looks shot properly beat eighteen shot in a hurry, and the two pieces you are least sure about are almost always the ones that eat the evening. Pull the hero pieces you actually want people to buy, then fill around them with the items that make those heroes make sense as an outfit.

Write the run order on paper and tape it to the till. Group by anything that saves a change: same model, same shoes, same styling family. Every trip to the fitting room is five minutes you will want back at the end of the night.

• Rail the whole collection in shooting order and walk it once
• Mark the three or four pieces that must come out well
• Group looks by whatever avoids a full change between them
• Decide the final piece in the sequence now, not at 10pm

Find two or three spots in the shop that already work

Walk the shop with the lights on and look for backgrounds rather than furniture. You want a clean stretch of wall for full-length frames, a corner with some texture or fixtures for the styled shots, and one tight spot for detail work — a fitting room bench, the end of a counter, a rail with a shallow depth of field behind it. Three spots is plenty. Any more and the set stops cohering.

The usual problem is the shop's own retail lighting. Track spots throw hard pools straight down, which puts shadows in eye sockets and a bright blob on shoulders. It is often better to switch off the spots directly overhead and work with the ambient fill, or to move your subject a metre forward so the light lands in front of them rather than on them. If you have a window and any daylight left, that is your best light in the building.

Check what is in the frame behind your spot before you commit. Sale signage, a fire extinguisher, a wonky hanger, your own reflection in a mirror or a glass cabinet. Two minutes of clearing the background now saves an argument with a photo later.

Shoot three frames per look, always the same three

For every outfit, take a full-length frame that shows proportion and hem length, a half or three-quarter frame that shows how the garment sits on the torso, and at least one detail — a cuff, a print, a button placket, the way a belt sits. That trio covers the questions a customer asks in order: what is it, how does it hang, what is it made of.

Keep the camera height consistent. Full-length frames shot from chest height distort less than frames shot from your eye level looking down, which shortens legs and makes hems look higher than they are. Mark your standing position on the floor with tape so every full-length in the set matches.

Take more frames than feels necessary of the two or three pieces you flagged as heroes, and fewer of everything else. It is normal to end up with forty usable images and use twenty. It is not normal to have one usable frame of the coat the whole season depends on.

• Full length, straight on, camera at chest height
• Half or three-quarter, showing fit through the body
• One detail crop that shows fabric or finish
• A movement frame for anything that drapes or swings

Keep the light and colour consistent across the whole night

The single thing that makes an amateur lookbook look amateur is that the first five images are warm and the last five are cold. This happens because the daylight through the window fades while your shop lighting stays on, and because auto white balance quietly corrects differently frame to frame. Lock your white balance manually if your camera or phone lets you, and do not change it partway through.

Shoot one frame at the start of the evening with a plain white or grey card in the shot, in each of your chosen spots. That gives you a known neutral reference to correct back to when you edit, instead of guessing what the actual colour of the knitwear was. It takes ten seconds and it is the difference between a correctable set and a set you have to eyeball.

If the light does shift on you, the fix is to bring everything to one look afterwards rather than to leave it. Flora is genuinely useful here: you can apply the same look to every frame in the set so the whole lookbook shares one lighting and colour treatment, while the garments keep their real colour, shape and cut. It edits photos you have already taken, so it will not rescue a frame where the hem is cut off, but it will stop a set drifting from warm to cold.

Sequence the finished set for the page it lives on

A website lookbook page and an Instagram carousel want different orders. On a page people scroll, so you can open with an atmospheric frame and build. In a carousel the first card decides whether anyone swipes at all, so it has to be the strongest single image, and the sequence after it should alternate wide and close so the swipe has rhythm.

Build the carousel by pulling from the same set rather than shooting separately for it. Pick one hero, then alternate: full-length, detail, full-length, detail. Put a second strong image last, because people who swipe to the end are the ones most likely to act on it.

Whatever you do, do not promise yourself that a good lookbook sells the collection. Nobody can honestly tell you that a set of photographs will move stock — too much of that depends on price, timing, and who happens to see it. What a coherent set actually does is answer the customer's questions without them having to ask, and give you a bank of assets you are not scrambling to make again in six weeks.

Prep the night before so the evening is only shooting

Steam everything the day before, not on the night. Steaming is slow, it is the single biggest time sink in a shop shoot, and a garment steamed on the night will still be damp and heavy in the frame. Hang steamed pieces on the rail in run order with the styling accessories already on the hanger.

Charge everything, clear a card, and put a lint roller, a set of clips, a pack of safety pins and a pair of scissors for loose threads on the counter. Pinning at the back of a garment to remove slack is fine and standard practice, as long as it is not being used to make a size look like it fits a body it does not fit.

Finally, decide when you are stopping. Set a hard end time and shoot the hero pieces first, so if the evening runs out you lose the filler and not the coat.

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