Photography Trip In Crisis? First Ten Days And Zero Photoshoots!
June 16, 2006
The No Model Update
What does an aspiring fashion model photographer do when there are no models to shoot? First of all accept it that it is part of struggling years.
I have heard similar stories from other photographers who are also just starting out.
Lack of quality, professional, unique and interesting models seems to be a common theme.
I believe I did as much as I could to plan for this trip. Preparations involved contacting numerous models and agencies still from Hawaii to line up ready-to-shoot assignments.
I sent out hundreds of e-mails to individual models and dozens to modeling agencies.
I received many positive responses and many confirmed shoots from models. A few agencies were also interested in either free test shootings or entertained the possibility of paying jobs.
I did this search for a few months up until my departure time.
Some of the biggest sites I used: photograaf.be and fotobord.be – Belgium, model-kartei.de – Germany, kmodels.com – Poland, craigslist.org, modelmayhem.com, onemodelplace.com, myspace.com for various countries.
Expecting the worst is a good way not to have false hopes and the start of this trip is giving me a taste of the worst.
“Sorry, I am a very busy person!” – I hear it from everyone.
Yes, everybody is very busy and for someone without a drive or a genuine interest in modeling it is a first and easiest excuse; I expect it and hear it a lot.
Some of the other news and responses I have received from my contacts aren’t more encouraging.
Belgium – none of the 2 done-deal model agencies responded to me with any concrete proposal, most models are studying for their finals and have zero free time until the end of June, my No1 model is now under contract and cannot shoot with me, others simply did not respond to my most recent e-mails.
Germany – my Berlin contact is moving and not ready to help me with accommodation for awhile; one of my most promising German models declined the black and white nude calendar project we planned for months due to change of heart. My makeup artist travel companion never responded.
Poland – my Warsaw model and contact is having financial and apartment difficulties and will not be able to shoot with me or let me stay at her place.
By the way this is not complaining I am just giving a status report why there are no new European photos and blogs yet.
So what am I doing in the meantime? Mostly web design and website promotion of this blog.
It is lot of work to become visible and get noticed out of billions of web pages and a strong online presence has numerous benefits.
One of my ongoing projects is to keep adding useful and different content to this blog. I am working on a few simple information pages about Mozilla Firefox web browser, portable Firefox web browser and various useful free portable apps.
While I was working in an internet cafe in Hawaii I was surprised how many people never heard of Mozilla Firefox and its portable version.
While preparing for this trip I used portable Firefox web browser and portable FileZilla FTP programs.
They were extremely useful not only because I could carry the programs and my settings on my thumb drive (since I do not own a computer) but also because of another benefit: increased productivity. I will also mention Wordpress the great blogging platform I am using.
I will blog about this subject at a later time in more detail when the pages are fully completed.
