These days, consumers, especially the younger generation are turning to Instagram as their main source of hair and beauty inspiration.
For hairstylists and salon owners, take this opportunity to showcase your beautiful hairstyles, perms and colors on Instagram! With more and more content flooding the platform, it’s more crucial than ever to stand out from the crowd and put your best work forward.
Here are 8 tips to up your photography game and attract more customers to your #instaworthy feed (and salon!)
1. Recommended Aspect Ratio
It’s best to keep photos at a 1:1 or 9:16 ratio to maximize the space it occupies on mobile screens, making your visuals more eye-catching to the user.
We don’t recommend using a landscape photo as it takes up a smaller space on the screens, and users are more likely to skip past it.
2. White Light > Yellow Light
For clean, pleasant and easy-to-view photos, always shoot in white light.
Yellow light, on the other hand, can make your subjects look dim and dull, taking away important details in the photo.
3. Facing Light > Back Light
When photographing your customers, face their hair towards the light to capture the most accurate color and sharpness.
Avoid backlight as much as you can! It overexposes your photo and makes your image blurry. You can check the examples below, which one is better?
4. Outdoor Light > Indoor Light
Whenever possible, shoot outdoors. Outdoor lighting is the most natural and inexpensive form of lighting you can find!
Aim to shoot on a clear sunny day or during mornings and evenings for a softer look.
Check out the vast difference in the model below, photographed in outdoor and indoor light. Outdoor lighting captures the varying shades in her hair naturally, while indoor lighting is too dim to make them out clearly.
5. Clean Background > Messy Background
A clean background makes all the difference. Make your subjects the center of attention by leaving the background clean and free of distractions.
Don’t be shy to request your customers to get up from their seats and move to a clean background when shooting their hair.
A messy background can easily distract the viewer from your hard work.
For product photos, you can add some props to make the background more interesting, as long as they are not taking away the focus from your main subject.
6. Rule of Thirds
The rule of thirds is a handy guideline to take well-composed photos.
How does it work? Put your subjects in the intersection point of the 4 lines for a well-balanced photo.
You can turn on this function in your smartphone camera and try it out too!
7. Show Hair Movement
Even if it’s not a video, an element of motion can instantly liven up your photo. This is especially great to showcase undercolor hair.
8. Play with Angles
Give your customers a better idea of your work with a multiple photo post showing different angles of a hairstyle.
This list is by no means exhaustive, but we hope you have found it useful! They can be applied to any form of photography besides hair photos as well.
Do you have any other good photography tips? Share it with us in the comments below!
