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Whenever I do a shoot, whether small or major, I always have a behind the scenes photographer/videographer on set for the moments I didn’t see while I’m busy setting up the lights, directing my crew and when the model gets her hair & makeup done. These are actually valuable moments that today’s publications wish to have from your photo sessions. Consider looking for an editor’s point of view who has to maximize and justify why dollars were spend on your images.

Editors evaluate everything as a package and the stronger the package they get for their dollars, the better it is to justify. They may even say “Hey, good job man”, which is meant, most of the time, to keep you pumped up and hungry to do more shoots in the future. Trust me, editors don’t want to work with photographers who have no passion or hunger of some kind to make things happen.

Here’s a tip!!                   Never ask: “What’s the budget?” The editor will let you know after he assures himself that he has found the right photographer for the job. There is no bigger turn-off to an editor than talking about money before the project has even been created.

So back to the behind the scenes. What goes down before the actual shoot, during the shoot and after the shoot has become almost as important for some as the actual pictorial. Editors need to have more that just pretty images to create an interesting lure/marketing content for the actual pictorial.  In my Playboy crew I have a permanent videographer and if he is not able to make it … the shoot has to be rescheduled whenever possible, or you need to have two BTS creators in hand in case one gets sick for example.

Most BTS and content creators are actually advanced assistants or photographers who  substitute their downtime by rolling B-Roll and shooting BTS. Whatever the case may be, make sure to treat all your crew well… not because they may be underpaid, but because they are priceless and I guarantee that you would not last a day on top of the industry without your crew and their support.

The title of this post should perhaps read: “The Things You Didn’t See” because we often don’t see the value of a good crew and BTS personnel. Photographers often think that they are going to be saving a dollar by not having support personnel/crew, what it actually amounts to is that you may be loosing an opportunity for not being able to produce rich content for submission that editors cannot ignore. The good old saying goes: You Get What You pay For”.

Another important assesment is for you to make sure that your production is worth doing and hiring the extra help. Because your crew needs a leader and that would be you. Consider your crew as an extension of yourself and they operate based on your vision. Clearly you are open for suggestions and a new crew will have them flying and bouncing off the walls. But you as a leader and the captain of you own ship need to set up the course, direction and not get lost in the sea of opinions and commentaries from your crew.

Most of you operate alone and shoot the model in the simplest way possible, utilizing the natural light and settings (which by-the-way is the most beautiful light) assuming that you can stand out amongst about 2 million other photographers. All of whom do the same and bombard editors on the edge of numbness and breaking point, with endless email submissions that they cannot tell apart from one another.

So you need to avoid “The Moments You Didn’t See” which might have nothing to do with your model, but instead everything else that goes and happens around your set (The Production). Turn the table and put yourself in the shoes of an editor and leave the sex-appeal out of the equation. Now all of a sudden you need to not only think about the model, but the layout and why publish it? Is it going to be strong enough to sell magazines? Does the model have a following or a story to tell that could equal to higher magazine sales revenue, and if I screw this up … my boss is going to chew me up for the third time.

NOTE: When you think about all that an editor needs to accomplish, it should give you [The Photographer] a better understanding of what you need to submit in order to increase your chances of getting published.

When we think about the publishing industry, photographers are not alone under the hammer, trying to find that paycheck. Editors are under a bigger political hammer than photographers. When a photographers fails, he just picks up an another model and try to make it better next time assuming that you are a freelancer and not experimenting on somebody else’s buck. Editors on the other hand, need to impress each and every time! When things go south for publishers, that’s when editors get replaced.

So, here are few thing to moll over before your next shoot to evaluate “The Moments You Didn’t See”.

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