According to Wikipedia lifestyle photography is "a style of portrait / people photography which aims to capture and document real-life events, situations, or milestones in an artistic manner and the art of the everyday." Photographers every day are advertising sessions as lifestyle photography, but in reality, are totally missing the mark.
I'm going to come at this from the point of family and couples photography. I am not well versed in the fashion point of lifestyle photography at the moment, so we'll save that for a later date.
Day after day I see photos of couples sitting in a park laughing and a photographer will tag it as "lifestyle." Is that really lifestyle? It's a moment but it's not a real life event. On any given day are you going to walk through this park and see them sitting there? Probably not and frankly, it's probably a park they've never been to before. Is the couple or family participating in something they would typically do?
Below is a typical photo that some would label lifestyle photography, but it's not. They're having fun, joking around and laughing, but they're not doing something they typically do. I caught a moment, I didn't catch a "lifestyle session." Little do you know they're right in front of a giant construction site that had this tent housing all their construction equipment. Do they hang out in front of construction sites on typical days? Nope. It was a location I drove by and they trusted my vision.
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