Ditty Bags! A quintessential part of every photographer’s stock, a ditty bag  holds our essential necessities for a shoot. I don’t know what you guys call it but I got used to the term years ago and always lovingly refer to mine as a ditty bag, even though I get the strange looks from my ’20 something assistants. When researching the reason for the name I found this great little article about ditty bag:  The Ditty Bag is “a small bag in which a sailor keeps small tools and equipment, also personal articles” according to John Rogers in Origins of Sea Terms: A modern Glossary of seagoing terminology. They did and still do have one main purpose: to hold a sailor’s personal possessions and some tools of the trade. They have even been referred to as a “housewife” because they held all the essentials for repairing clothing, personal belongings as well as everything that was needed on deck!

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The second half of day two of my seminars addresses the business side of fashion photography. I jump in by reminding my students that one of the biggest mistakes photographers make is forgetting that fashion photography is a business, like any other business, and the purpose of being in business is to obviously make money. That’s kind of a no-brainer, right? We are all aware that we need to generate revenue in order to survive. However, after reminding my students of the importance of remembering that this is a business, I then ask them WHY they are interested in pursuing fashion photography. I mean, why aren’t they interested in say, food photography or portraiture, weddings or cars? Aside from teaching at my seminars, I also answer a huge amount of emails. And again, I ask the people emailing me with questions about how they can make it as a fashion photographer, why are they interested in fashion photography as oppose to other avenues of photography. What baffles me is not very many people can answer that question. What IS fashion photography? I mean, the answer is right there: FASHION photography is about the fashion. It’s the business of photographing the fashion for either editorial or advertising purposes. It’s about selling the clothes! The CLOTHES!!!!

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