One photograph per garment. Every image the drop needs.
Ghost-mannequin product shots, on-model imagery, campaign frames and video, generated from one flat photograph of the physical piece.
MayI Studio is the pipeline that does it. It is built, it has run a garment end to end, and a fashion brand has bought it.
The shorts on this page are that brand’s, shown with their permission, and they stay unnamed. One image here is a photograph. Everything after it, the video included, was generated from that photograph, and the people in it are generated too.
The sample is finished weeks before the pictures are.
Nothing goes live without images, so the shoot sets the launch date. And the shoot is the part that needs a studio, a model, a photographer, and one free afternoon in four different calendars.
The bill scales with the range.
$27k to $42k a year of product photography for a fifty-style catalogue
Fifty styles at ten images each is five hundred images a year. Freelance sits at the bottom of that range and a studio at the top, and it grows every season the range does.
The calendar is the part you cannot buy.
2 to 8 weeks from brief to delivered files
Sample to studio, studio to model, model to retoucher, retoucher back to you. The drop waits on the slowest calendar in that chain, whoever it belongs to.
A change means doing it again.
A second colourway. A re-cut after fitting. A market that wants a different model. The sample goes back in a box, the studio gets booked again, and the images you already paid for are the wrong images.
The garment is finished. The photographs are what the launch is waiting on.
Which makes photography a dependency rather than a cost line, and it is the one part of a drop that nobody can pull forward by working harder at it.
Figures: Nightjar’s 2026 product-photography cost breakdown, for a fifty-product brand at about five hundred images a year, 27,000 USD freelance against 42,000 through a studio. Lead time: PicJam’s 2026 fashion photography guide, Australian market, two to eight weeks from brief to file delivery. Both are published by companies that sell AI product photography, which is to say by my competitors. Weigh them accordingly and check them against your own last invoice.
The product shot, the model, the campaign, and the video.
Four different jobs, four different invoices and four different days in a normal season. Here they are, from the one photograph at the top of this page.
Ghost mannequin
On white, with the garment holding its own volume, so the listing shows the piece and not a hanger. Turned to whichever views the product page needs.
On the model
Styled, on white, at the angles a listing asks for. This is the profile. The front view is the one at the top of this page.
Campaign
On location, in a scene you pick. No travel, no permit, no crew, and the location does not have to be somewhere that exists.
Video
Short-form video for social, cut from the same garment. This one is five seconds long and silent.
Four different jobs. One garment, photographed once.
And it is the same garment in all four, which is something you can check rather than something you have to take from me. The next section is where to look.
The rips are in the same places every time.
That is the whole job. An image that quietly redesigns the product is not a product image, it is a returns problem with good lighting.
The photograph
Ghost mannequin
On the model
Campaign
Holding a garment still across four images is not a prompting problem. A model that has never been taught how clothes are built will move a rip, close a slash, or hang a hem where the pattern says it cannot go, and it will do all of that beautifully, which is exactly what makes it dangerous. The picture looks expensive and the product in it is not yours.
I trained in Textile and Clothing Technology and spent years making patterns in CLO 3D, which is why this pipeline has a checking step at all. Knowing where a seam has to sit is the difference between an image that sells the piece and an image that describes a piece you do not make.
The garment has to exist first.
One real photograph of the finished piece is the input, so this does nothing for a style that is still a sketch. And if your market needs a photograph of the exact physical item on a real person, this is not that either. Both of those are worth saying before a call rather than during one.
If the shoot is what your next drop is waiting on, that is the call.
What the call is for
Bring one style you are about to shoot. We look at what you already have of it and at what this would return, and by the end you will know whether it fits your product and whether I am the right person to build it.
What is in the fifteen minutes
- 01You describe one garment and the images it needs.
- 02We go through what this can and cannot do with it.
- 03You get a yes, a no, or the reason it is not ready yet.
No deck, and no proposal inside the call.