Photo Challenge: Dress for Success

Dress for Success: this is a life lesson that many start to learn at an early age. Success at the potty was more likely with an elastic waist than with overalls or button-fly. As we progressed through life, successful dressing helped us attain popularity, college admission, and jobs. Whether through form or function, clothing helps us achieve success.

This is true when we are taking photos as well. An appropriately dressed subject will yield a better photo than one wearing a less desirable outfit.

As a mother of small children, I have some control over what they wear. In particular, I can increase my chances of successful photos by careful choice of their clothing purchases. This is most important with clothing that they will wear often, such as winter jackets. Look at the following photo of my son in a yellow jacket.

Although the yellow jacket is nice and safe, it easily shows dirt and clashes with all my favorite snow-themed patterned papers. My other son has a blue and green jacket. It has reflectors making it just as safe and allows for more flexibility when designing a scrapbook page.

Of course, a white jacket would have been an even worse choice as the subject would completely disappear into the snow.

Whenever we go on a family outing, we take the camera and try to get a picture of the entire family. If the family is dressed in coordinated clothing, we will have a better photo. This doesn't mean that the whole family should wear the same shirt, but everyone in a denim (or leather) jacket will lead to a nice coordinated photo. Likewise, everyone wearing a shirt in the same color family will lead to a nice photo, and give me flexibility when choosing a color scheme for the layout.

While we can't always control the clothing of others, we can carefully choose our own outfits on days that we will appear in the photos. For example, I always bring out the cake at my children's birthday parties and the photo always goes into a scrapbook. I can carefully choose a shirt that will coordinate with the shirt my son will be wearing, but not dominate since he should be the focal point of the photo.

Sometimes one is lucky enough to go to an event where the clothing color is dictated. This is really a photographic and scrapbooking opportunity: the more your group adheres to the color scheme, the better the photos. This is true even if the color is bright orange.

Many people think about dressing for successful photos when going to a professional photographer. However, I challenge you to think about this in your day-to-day life and enjoy the benefits on your scrapbook pages.

Shop at the Scrapbook.com Superstore for all your Scrapbooking Supplies!
Enjoy 5-Star service, HUGE selection and LOW prices!
Click here to start shopping!