Shooting At Home: The Bedroom
With many of us currently at home or in lockdown, opportunities for photoshoots are mostly confined to where we live!
Don’t worry – even if you don’t have a home studio, there is still a huge range of subjects you can shoot at home which will be relevant for the publishing industry.
In this series of posts we’ll be sharing our tips for shooting at home. We’ll also suggest popular concepts and themes for book publishing which can be shot in different rooms and spaces wherever you live!
The bedroom
Bedrooms are our most private and intimate spaces in the home, and as such they appear on book covers of all genres.
An unmade bed or rumpled sheets can have obvious romantic associations! They can hint at loss or absence as well; untidy bedding can also suggest a life in disarray.
Empty cots and cribs are powerful subjects, and are frequently used by designers to suggest a lost or longed-for child.
We also see many cover designs where a bed is positioned close to a window. As well as creating strong lighting, this can also add a contemplative mood, or contrast the bedroom with the world outside.
Clothing
Emptying your wardrobe could be a starting point for a photoshoot at home! Clothing and shoes often feature prominently in fiction cover designs.
Lingerie and nightwear can be used in designs to suggest romance, sex, intimacy or infidelity.
Children’s clothing can be very evocative, and often features in thrillers or mysteries where a missing child is a plot point.
Clothes which are dirty, tattered or even bloodstained are a consistently popular concept for crime fiction and horror.
If you are fortunate enough to have vintage clothes or costumes at home, these will be well worth including for period fiction titles.
We also receive a lot of requests from designers for clothing details of all kinds – we recommend including a few compositions that pick out buttons, buckles, sleeves, ribbons, folds, or any other interesting features!
We hope this gives you some starting points for home photoshoots – over the rest of this series we’ll suggest some themes and book cover concepts that can be shot in each room of the house!
