How to dress for your outdoor portrait session: 4 ways
There are many ways to start when planning your wardrobe for outdoor portraits, but I will focus on the ones I think are most effective, and that we’ve received the best feedback on. The easy way to go would be to let everyone dress themselves in what they feel most comfortable in, which is great! Be yourself, for sure.
However, the number of times I’ve been at an ordering session and heard someone say “Ugh! I wish my Dad hadn’t worn his tennis shoes!”, or “the blues are so off”, or “I wish I’d steamed/ironed my daughter’s dress!”… is a lot. These things can be avoided with proper planning.
Basic Rules
Don’t force yourself into new clothes that you bought just to go with a color scheme or a magical dress size, and definitely don’t wait to get things tailored. Make sure you’ve tried your clothes on, and your shoes will be comfortable for the outdoor location you chose. You need to be comfortable, and the clothes/shoes need to fit.
Where are the photos ending up? Is this going in a living room as an art piece over a sofa, or as the first thing guests see in your entry? We might need to think about your home decor and what the goal end product is.
Who will be in the photos? Is this extended family? This makes it a little more challenging, because we are dealing with different generations and clothing styles. Start with a style of clothing, or level of casual or fancy that everyone can agree on, and this applies head to toe.
Is there a chance that your child will fight you on the clothing? Don’t risk a meltdown, tantrum, or power struggle. Make the outfit their idea by including them in the decision of what they wear.
1. Advanced Styling - full visualized planning layout
It can be as easy as picking 2-3 colors and telling everyone to choose clothing from that palette mixed with neutrals, but some things can go very wrong if you don’t think about how you will be standing together and layering. Here’s a video to explain this visually (turn on captions):
2. Use what you have, but start with one “Lead”
You do not have to buy all new clothes, shoes, and accessories for portraits. There is a way to do this with all clothes you have in the closet, or buying a few new items to mix with what you already have.
Pull one dress or shirt with a pattern and a few colors in it. Pull the rest of the clothing pieces from those colors.
Do: Lay the outfits together on the floor according to how they will be standing together to make sure the heights are properly mixing and contrasting.
Don’t: Add in more than one other busy pattern unless the scale of the pattern is different (ex. large buffalo plaid can mix with a skinny stripe, but don’t mix the same scale of floral patterns).
4. jeans on the bottom, one color for tops
It became a trend many years ago to do khakis or jean bottoms and pair with a black or white top, or some variation of that. It can be next level to do this look if you add layers and variations in the clothes, so that it doesn’t look too matchy-matchy. This look can be elevated all the more if you focus on quality and tailoring. Check out some inspo on what people are doing for this look these days.
Bottom line: This can be a very 90s in-a-good-way look, but elevated with layers.
4. Keep it simple, dress however you want, and don’t worry about it.
This is for laid back folks who don’t care about hair out of place, and are ready to let the wind take over and embrace a little dirt. Pull clothing that you feel good in, and maybe stick to a neutral color palette. If you are going to be focused on the emotion and big genuine smiles and not the perfection of the image, I LOVE that type of session. But it’s not about what I love, its about you. Bottom line: Know thyself.
Tips for success
Steam and iron your clothes the day before, clean shoes, and bring backup comfortable shoes if your outdoor location requires a walk, and there’s a chance your kids will need to run around at first or might kick their shoes through dirt on the way to the main spot. Please do not torture yourself and wear high heels walking through a field or dirt path!
Bring a bag with backup shoes, wipes, touchup makeup and a mirror, a brush or comb and hairspray, and a blanket to sit on that goes with your color palette. You will want to empty all of your pockets into that bag before shooting begins, this includes car keys, wallets and phones. Your photographer cannot carry all of these items in addition to lenses and cameras, although we wish we could!
Editing and photoshopping can do a lot, but not all edits are simple or free. Please don’t rely on asking us to photoshop everything that is out of place- it’s not always possible, and it adds hours of labor to your edit. Requests that are not free in our retouching process are fixing hair, taking out glare from your glasses, removing tan lines, or taking out every wrinkle in your clothes, etc. Those are labor intensive and we oftentimes have to outsource it to a specialist. If you are very particular about every strand of hair being in place, we recommend an indoor studio session.
If you are self conscious about uneven skin coloring, we have had great success from people who use Airbrush legs or something similar. Try it out first to make sure you have mastered how to blend it and avoid streaks.
If you wear glasses or transition lenses, consider asking your optometrist for a pair of frames with no lenses in them and wear contacts for your session.
