July 25 and Scouting

When I arrived at the studio at 10:30 in the morning I was quickly put to work organizing model photos for an advertising job with a mall that is opening in Natick, Mass. Callie, the studio manager, told me that dealing with model talent was the hardest part of the job and I get to see why with this shoot production. The organization of the talent included printing out pictures of the models, writing the name of the model, writing out the representing model agency, and the price of the model. Scott likes to have the pictures in his hands to physically move around on a table and not on the computer. He laid them out with titles (like “white boy” or “ethnic woman”) and in the first pile his first picks, the second pile his second picks, and the third pile his last ditch picks. This way he can go down the list and check availability and write yes and no on the actual pictures.

After helping to organize the model pictures and information Scott, Ryan, and I went to scout “The Glen”, a restaurant / hotel in downtown Atlanta, GA. We met people from Current, the ad agency that contracted Scott, who were acting art directors for the shoot. We walked around the hotel and Scott shot pictures of what he thought could be used for the shoot\After scouting, we all rode back to the studio and talked about the shoot on Thursday Aug. 2^nd and the preparation day before. Scott told me that if a photographer wasn’t sure about the lighting he could have it worked about before hand by either setting up in a similar area or come in a few days before and do a test day.

Scott also told me some things about scouting: Don’t burn bridges with the owners of the places you are shooting, if you are shooting for someone else, you should shoot even the bad angles so you can explain that these are bad angles, keep a library of scouting pictures so you can use them for other shoots, a good scouting lens would be a zoom lens like 28 – 104 mm, shoot a room wide then go in tight for specific shoots, and shoot a background how it will look - if will be out of focus shoot background that way.

I left the studio at 6 pm.