Advice to photographers to minimise missing model events.

Models very often tour the UK and sometimes offer photographic breaks abroad and when they advertise these events they can only put the location of the event, because of PP rules about spamming. These events might be just outside your notification radius, but rather than increasing that radius and flooding your notifications with irrelevant castings and events here are a few tips to make sure you don’t miss out on models tours, events and studio days near you or that might be of interest to you, but minimising the amount of notifications.

Studio search.

Do a search for studios in your area and widen the search area to just over how far you are willing to travel to (just to make sure you don’t miss out on a chance of a studio that’s 15mins further down the road) and right click on the thumbnail image, click on “open in new tab” button (so it doesn’t mess up the search). Click on the new tab and make sure they hold studio days (a lot of studios don’t hold them) by looking through their thumbnails in there in their ports for the posters/flyers or by clicking on the “Events” button if it has a number in brackets. Click on the “Follow” button and deselect everything except “Receive on-site event notifications” (middle one). You can leave them all checked but it will just add to your notifications and we’re trying to minimise them so you only get notified about things you want to see. Do this for all the studios that hold studio days in your area.

Model search.

Next, go through your “Want to work with” list and make sure that you click on the “Follow” button on each of the models the models. When the three options are offered select the “Receive on-site event notifications” just like the studios, but also select “Receive on-site casting call notifications” so that you will be notified when they are on tour. Also do a search by whatever criteria you feel is important age, references or experience and expand the search to cover as wide an area as possible and right click on the models that you’re interested in working with (just like the studios above) and follow them. You can also use gadgets like the FPI list or the “share-a-shoot” group to look for models that you may wish to work with.

Alter notifications.

Next go to the top of the page and click on “Castings” and “Events” and make sure that the area is well within your travel limit (you may have set it high to try and catch a model on tour on your list), if you only wish to travel for an hour each way have the radius set for about 35 miles (adjust to taste). There will be no need to cause you will now be notified by steps 1 and 2 of the events and models that interest you, but if someone offers something “on your doorstep” then you will also be notified.

 

If you follow the above steps, which may take an hour or more to complete, but you won’t miss the opportunity to work with your favourite models, but minimising the amount of notifications you receive so it will be time well spent and you’ll only have to do it on a large scale once. You can follow more models as you notice them by whatever means in the future.