Men's Fashion · Outdoor Campaign
Men's Fashion · Outdoor Location Campaign
A multi-location outdoor campaign for a menswear brand, shot across two distinct Shanghai settings — a seaside wooden deck and a riverside garden with reflective water features. We coordinated creative direction, location scouting, styling and model photography to deliver campaign-ready images for brand marketing across online and offline channels.
The brief
Menswear buyers do not browse the way womenswear buyers do. They look for fit, for fabric weight and for whether a jacket reads as expensive in an ordinary setting, which is why a single clean studio frame rarely closes a menswear order on its own. This campaign was built to answer that: real daylight, real surroundings, and enough variety in one body of work that a buyer sees a range rather than a single afternoon.
The practical decision behind it was covering two completely different kinds of outdoor setting in one campaign — frames at street level against built frontage, and frames in the open with water and sky behind the model. Two environments read as two stories on a collection page, and they carry garments from opposite ends of the range: a hooded down jacket belongs in the first, a short-sleeved polo belongs in the second. One model, one crew, one production, images that cover more than one drop.
How it was shot
Locations were scouted before the shoot and the running order of the day was planned around the light rather than around the map. The two settings pose opposite problems, which is exactly why both are worth having. Against dark glass and dark shopfronts, the background is as dark as the garment, so the separation has to come from putting the model in the light and letting the frontage fall away behind him. Against open sky the problem inverts: the sky is far brighter than a face, so the exposure is set for the garment and the sky is held with control rather than allowed to blow out to white.
The open frames were shot from a low camera position so that the sky becomes the backdrop. That is the cheapest set in photography: it removes every distracting object from behind the model, it costs nothing to build, and it leaves clean space for a logo or a headline when the image is used as a banner. Wardrobe changes were handled on location, with each garment steamed and pinned to fit the model properly, because a half-size too large reads instantly on a man’s shoulder line and no amount of retouching recovers it.
Every look was framed with the downstream crops already in mind: headroom for a landscape banner, enough width for a square feed post, and a clean vertical for a catalogue page. Colour was matched to the physical samples under controlled light after the shoot, which is the step that keeps a navy from turning black and a charcoal from turning blue across a set of images photographed hours apart in two different places. Two rounds of revisions are included.
Behind the Scenes
Campaign Imagery
What a campaign like this costs
On-model work is booked by the studio day, because that is how the cost actually behaves: the model and the hair-and-make-up artist are a day rate whether you shoot eight looks or twenty. So the figure below is a day, and the per-look price is simply that day divided by a full one.
| Line item | Price |
|---|---|
| Photography and retouching — one studio day, up to 20 looks | US$2,600 per day, or US$130 per look |
| Each look beyond 20 on the same day | US$130 |
| Model, hair and make-up — one 8-hour day, cast in Shanghai | US$1,750–2,250, itemised on your quote |
| Set building, props or an outside location | At cost, quoted before we book |
A full 20-look day therefore lands between US$4,350 and US$4,850 all in — 80 to 120 retouched images, our studio, lighting and grip, the model, hair and make-up, styling, and the signed portrait release in English. Nothing is added to that afterwards. Finished images are delivered three working days after the shoot. The whole published list, including the volume ladder and the white-background and ghost-mannequin rates, is on our pricing page — you do not have to send an enquiry to see it.
Questions buyers ask about this kind of shoot
Does an outdoor campaign cost more than shooting in the studio?
The photography and retouching day rate is the same. What gets added is scouting time, transport and any location permission or fee, and those are itemised on the quote at cost rather than marked up. In practice a location day in and around Shanghai adds less than most clients expect, and it is almost always cheaper than building a set that imitates the same place.
Can you shoot two locations in one day?
This campaign did exactly that. Two settings within reasonable travel of each other is comfortable in one day; three starts to cost looks, because every move is roughly an hour of daylight that is no longer being photographed. We will tell you which of your shortlisted locations fit in a single day before you book, not after.
We do not have a model — can you cast one?
Yes, we cast in Shanghai and the agency fee, the hair and make-up artist and the signed release are quoted as one itemised line so you can see exactly what the person costs. The published range is on our pricing page. If you would rather avoid model costs entirely, the same garments can be shot on a ghost mannequin instead, which is a per-image rate with no day rate at all.
Where to go next
If what you need first is listing images rather than a campaign, ghost mannequin photography and flat lay photography are both published per piece, and we will shoot one piece free so you can judge the work before you order — three main angles plus the detail shots, 9 to 11 finished images, no watermark and no obligation. Sample shipping anywhere in China is on us. It covers still photography only, once, for a new client, and not highly reflective or transparent goods.
The rest of our campaign work is in the portfolio, product film and 3D animation are on the video production page, and the studio itself is described on our about page.
Planning a similar project?
Tell us about your products and we’ll prepare a production plan. Published prices are on our pricing page — no enquiry needed to see them.
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