Monday, November 17, 2008

How I Became A Glamour Photographer: Best Of The Best 2

November 17, 2008

in Fitness,My Story

And now for something completely different.

Kerriana

Kerriana

That Monty Python quote could have described my experience May of 2005. I shoot Goth Celebrity Batty and then one week later I’m off to Playa Del Carmen to be one of the photographers competing in the reality TV show, Best of the Best 2.

The idea was 10 models and 13 photographers. You we suppose to shoot all the models and then you’d be judged to see who was the best of the best.

One thing you will ask right off, “If I was competing was this really the best of the best?” I’d only been shooting a few months seriously. Not really but that’s marketing for you.

There was only 8 models, because two took off after they go there. It’s in the show which aired on MavTV. That has to be the highest form of flaking I’ve ever seen.

Reality TV Sucks

It ended up being a very intense 4 days. They gave you a schedule where you shot with a model for 45 minutes. You’d shoot 3 a day. At the end of the shooting you turned in your images and were judged on them.

We spent the mornings in workshops while the models were in makeup. Then we shot in the afternoon – not the best time for light on the beach. Then in the evening there was a mandatory party till very late. I think sleep deprivation was part of the plan.

These are not the best of conditions for producing quality images. Now Rick Hughes, one of the guys running the show, said that is the real world. You don’t always get the time you need to get the shot you are suppose to get. Maybe, maybe not. He’s still more experienced than I am, so it must be so. It does teach you you must get it right in camera.

Most new photographers in this digital age think, “Oh so my exposure is off, I shoot RAW I’ll fix it in post.” Or “There is pole coming out of her head, oh well I can fix that in Photoshop.”. Not when you have 3 hours to do all of your post production on 6 shoots. I had some great images that needed mistakes fixes and I worked on them, but there wasn’t enough time didn’t get other images that could have been great fixed in time.

The other reason reality TV sucks is drama is the key to a good show, and drama is conflict. Among the guys – who weren’t really the focus of the show – there wasn’t really any conflict. Even when there was a screw up and one guy took the wrong model, keeping another photographer from shooting with her, there wasn’t any drama. But they could use the models against you.

Alexandra

Alexandra

There was a point where they brought every person into a room, you stood in front of a U shaped table with all the judges, MUAs, and TV guys and they asked you questions. During that interview one of them ask me out of the blue “One of the models said you were a little touchy feely. What do you say to that?”

Well I was stunned. I never touch a model without permission, and during all these shoots I only touched one model period. So I said something along those lines, probably with a little bit of heat in my voice.

The show was late nights and long days the whole week. And I was at the end of my emotional rope. This crushed me to such an extent I went and talked to one of the judges about it. I was deathly afraid I was about to be portrayed on national television as a perv and no model would ever shoot with me again. Robert Sanders, the judge I went to, told me not to worry, they weren’t out to destroy anyone and I got better.

I knew which model that had to have said that, so I later talked to her about it. She said she didn’t say anything as bad as that sounded and actually liked me because I was the only photographer who brought something for her to wear. It was all drama for the show.

You Are Better Than You Think

To this day I thought I had to have finished near the end of the pack. I saw some of the other guys images and they were great. All I saw was the flaws in mine.

But you know when the show came out I realized they used a lot of my images in the show. Kerriana’s title image is one of mine.

So is an image they used of Gelecia, which I thought was really bad. When we went to shoot it was late in the day and storm came though. I had a whole planned shoot, but suddenly there was no sun. I had to use (gasp) on camera flash. Which SUCKS. But they like the images enough.

We also didn’t get to shoot with two of the models in time for the competition. Schedule just worked out where we had to turn stuff in on Saturday, but didn’t shoot the last two until Sunday. For me those two were Kristin and Jessica B. Jessica ended up being the winner of the model competition.

This also means that until I decided to write this post and put an image of each model below, I hadn’t retouched images of these two models. So I did a quick once over, but they are pretty raw. And I forgot how small those D70 6 megapixel images were.

Below are some images from that week. If you have any questions about what it is like to be on a reality TV show, or shooting under pressure, use the comments.

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Art And The Marketplace

November 17, 2008

in Instruction

Off Photography.alltop.com I found this interesting article about art and the marketplace.

One of the survey questions I got was, “Why would anyone want to photograph models when there is little to no chance they will make any money doing it?” It is interesting the struggle artists have with being able to make money from their art.

I do it because it is fun and fulfilling. Money is a secondary consideration. Most of the photographers doing this kind of photography do it as a hobby and want to make enough money to pay for their gear and studio.

The problem with art is that once you start doing it for the money you lose a lot of the joy of it. It goes from being something you want to do to something you have to do. Maintaining joy under those conditions is hard. Some do, but most don’t.

Challenges Of The Marketplace

There are people who make money doing art and still enjoy it. I think the key is to not create art for the money, but rather let money come to the art.

There are a number of challenges with this.

First, money rarely just finds you. Instead you have to sell yourself to it let it know where you are. Most artists have a hate/hate relationship with sales and marketing, so when they have to do it all the joy is sucked out of the process. Plus you feel time spent marketing is time you could be spent doing what you love, creating.

My only advice is to look on marketing as a creative endeavor. One of the things we do in art is communicate and create feelings. Those are the same thing we do in marketing. Think about it.

Second, artists don’t always want to create what the audience wants. They want to create what they want to create and hope it finds an audience. When it doesn’t we either feel we suck, or people suck. Neither is conductive to a positive mental health or making money.

You can’t hate the people who can buy your work.

Artists find a way to express themselves. To create we constantly have to be doing something new and different. When we become a commodity – like photographing a wedding – we are asked for the same thing over and over. But an artist can do that and find a new way to look at the same thing. It takes a really great artist, someone with a powerful grasp of their art, to let us see something old in a new way. I’ve seen wedding photography that made me go “Wow, if I could shoot a wedding like that, I’d shoot weddings.”

If you have to do it for the money, look for new ways to express yourself every time and in everything.

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Something For The Ladies, Christian

November 17, 2008 Glamour Read the full article →