Why does a photoshoot take so much time?

Not really angry enought for the Pit:

One of the local papers is running a story on our choir manager. An email went round this morning asking for volunteers to turn up at lunch time for a “quick” photoshoot to get some background pictures for the story. About 10 of us were free and went along.

An hour later…

How can it take an hour to take a couple of snaps of choristers? Why do these photographers always want everything to look so “artistic”? It’s a background photo!

Because they get paid (and hopefully hired again) for taking nice pictures You arn’t going to find a photographer who will half ass things to save time. They take pride in there work.

And that time is the reason why photographers can take pictures that look like a pro took them- not the assortment of red eyes and double chins and wierd postures that your average roll of snapshots will have. Probably the most time-intensive part is getting the lighting right. It can sometimes take hours before the shoot to light things, and inevitably you will have to spend some time with the actual people ajusting things. Each person and place is different and needs it’s own lighting scheme. Then there is time spent choosing angles, getting different expressions, etc. You just can’t know what will work for sure until you try it. So you try everything you can while you are shooting. And you can’t ever know for sure what the customer will like, so you need variety.

If you remember the days before digital, try to remember how often you’d get a roll of photos back with maybe one or two decent shots and quite a few badly exposed, weirdly posed or just plain ugly ones. Pro’s can’t have that (or more specifically, they can’t have just that). They need to do a good job each and every time and have a number of good images to choose from. That takes time.

Hah! Try movies/TV. During my student job as a security guard, I once clocked a weekend’s overtime in an an unoccupied office building while a TV programme was shooting. Over fifty people for an entire weekend to show the main character walking into a building, going up to the receptionist, saying they were there to see so-and-so, and riding up in a lift. Maybe 30 seconds tops, if they ever even used the footage.

Were you nekkid for the shoot?