Testing in the world of photography

In the complex and psychological world of fashion photography, investing some time to collaborate with new people gives the possibility to keep everyone's skills flexible and up to date with the new trends and talented professionals.

When you are starting: building your portfolio

This environment is strongly based on how good your portfolio is. You can be a photographer, a model, a make up artist or a wardrobe stylist: your portfolio is what will sell yourself or gives you lots of rejections. Your portfolio is the most important thing you have to have, and it better be good.
When you are starting, building a portfolio should be your most important target, and you can do in few ways.
- You can pay something very good to work with or
- you can work with many different people doing a lot of tests.

The first solution will deliver some good quality shots in a single session, the second one will require more time, efforts and luck. Despite the fact that everybody need quality in their portfolios, I think that if you are starting up you need experience and in order to do so one session is not enough. This is why testing and asking people to test with you is important.

Your portfolio should change every time. Keep it up to date

If, differently from my previous point, you already have a strong portfolio, an important thing to remember is that it should never remain the same for long. Yes, you will be able to use some of the photos you will have taken for a client, but testing and working for free with up and coming professionals is, in my very personal opinion, still the best option to fill the gaps with new images.
Reason is: you do not know who the next Richard Avedon or the new Kate Moss will be. It is a long shot I know, sometimes you will work with people who are not worth your time, but you will give them a hand and, if you are lucky, they will return you the favour.

Networking

One of the thing I know is that your success is very much defined by the people you know. Those who respect you and those you helped will support you, will speak highly of you. Networking is vital in this industry, and testing plays an important role in the "giving and receiving favours" game

Losing the "diva attitude"

In these years I had the luck to meet some really fabulous people, who helped me a lot and whom I will help any way I can to return the favour. Alas not everyone is kind and not everyone embraces the idea of testing; I call these the people with the "diva attitude". Some of them do not even bother replying to an enquiry or are rude if they do it. Losing this attitude in such a small world, trust me.
Next week we will hold a beauty shoot for a published competition and, as always, I have sent my casting call to find the right models. One of those who promptly replied wrote us that she is kind, professional and easy to work with. Unfortunately for her I remember people's behaviour, and I remember when she, few weeks ago, rudely snubbed a testing request. She will not work with us, not because I want a revenge, that would be silly, but because we don't like working with divas: it is not funny nor easy. I am sure she will find someone else who will book her for a published job, not us.

We love testing, and we will always invest our time in working with up and coming, committed professionals.
Do you?

A big thanks to Monique Burrell, the fantastic model who accepted our test request for the images you can see in this post!