Less pin-up, more set-up

I’ve never had cable TV before, but at my new place I’ve been watching it a bit and I’ve noticed there are a lot of advertisements with scantily clad women and commercials of models having their picture taken.

My roommate also buys a bunch of tuner magazines and these always have scantily clad women all over them as well.

A quick search for “model shoot” on Google’s video search just now, turned up pages of segments with models having their pictures taken with flashes popping and bad music playing.

Where am I going with this?

You know what I’d like to see, less of the scantily clad women, bad music and random beeps and flashes and more of the behind the scenes set-up from the photographers.

With my rejuvenated interest in lighting, I think it’s be cool to see photographers break down how they do what they do.

I haven’t found to many places where I’ve seen this, but last fall when I brought Michael Grecco to San Jose State University to speak, he showed us a time lapse video of a recent shoot that really helped break it down.



Also from time to time Strobist posts about set-ups and includes some videos from other folks.



And although he doesn’t do it often enough, when Kevin German talks about his newest studio project, it’s a treat.

I think there’s a niche here that could be filled by NPPA, PDN, Stobist, the Discovery Channel, MTV (“I wanna be a fashion photographer,” huh MTV? Wanna sign me on to produce? It is my idea) or some enterprising blogger. Why not create a 3min video segment that walks us through how a shoot was done and actually talks to us about the craft rather than just throwing bad techno over lazy footage.

And that’s my thought of the day.