Here's a few of the situations you might meet and need to know about.
1) Getting lots of suitable girls willing to do the work. It needs new girls, once a girl has done some work she gets into a mode of posing that's tough to break her out of. Also experienced girls will want to know how much money you will pay, agents won't send you girls unless you pay the price they demand. Look at $300 a day as a rough estimate plus agents fee. The further East you go the cheaper it might get. Still advertising for girls will need the promise of making good money.
You will find 1 in 20 of the girls that turn up will look like 3 of the the teens you posted in the other thread. The vast majority of girls will look like the ones I posted. So you need clients who will take all sorts.
You will also need to get local girls or travel to where they are. Girls won't usually travel 100 miles for a casting.
Some girls will not turn up for a casting with a stranger and bring their documents. If you're in England that means a passport. Some girls might not even have one.
2) Getting good locations. You could try shooting it at home. This will mean a steady trail of girls turning up at your home so be prepared with an excuse for why so many girls are coming to your home. My neighbors and the local taxi drivers thought I was running an escort agency. I thought it better to tell them I was a shooter.
If you shoot from home you will need to be constantly redecorating. The same 4-5 rooms soon get shot to death doing this work.
Hotels tend to all look the same after a while. Rented apartments also need you to take a suitcase or three of props and general clothing to spread around.
Both hotels and apartments cost money and have to be budgeted for. When we shot our Readers Wives pictures in Prague we rented apartments. But 10 to 30 girls would turn up. Shooting even half of them for $500 sets left us with a profit. If an attractive one turned up with IDs we could shoot a set worth from $1,000 to $4,000 on a casting.
Shooting in the girls home is rarely an option. It requires parents or partners approval, not always easy to get.
3) Relating to the girls. Not everyone has the personality to relate to a girl while doing this kind of work. Getting the girl to relax like she would if she were shooting herself or a friend was is easier said then done. Then pulling out your mobile phone to shoot them with is going to get a lot of them thinking WTF is this about?
With my experience I was able to carry it off. Especially when the saw pro strobe lights around, even though I wasn't using them it was obvious I was a pro shooter. Using a mobile phone or $200 camera is not going to make a girl think you're serious. Not knowing exactly what you're doing is also going to put them on guard. These are often solo girls in a strange place being shot semi naked or naked by a stranger. Not as easy as you might think.
4) Boyfriends, partners or even friends. The fact that they turned up with some one screams "I don't trust you" or "I'm nervous" or even worse "They're in charge". You will need to get over this barrier, either by slinging them out or gaining their confidence by a combination of personality and knowing what you're doing. Friends , partners and boyfriends can often take over the meeting and very often in a negative way. Be prepared to deal with it.
5) Advertising and recruiting girls. It has always taken the promise of big bucks to motivate girls to turn up for castings. Offering them $50 to do work won't cut it. Offering $50 for turning up at a casting might if you promise big bucks afterwards. We tried the second route and it didn't work, because they were suspicious. So went back to to just offering $500 a day minimum. Then when the girls turned up with ID which they have to carry in Czech we were able to tell them we would pay them for 15 minutes work.
Think of how they will react when you offer them $50 to shoot them naked on your mobile phone.
6) Castings. I keep using this word so let me explain why. You need lots of girls to turn up to do the work for very little money. They will not turn up to do a specific shoot for usually anything less than $200. Even here in Czech they often don't turn up for that price. So telling them it's a casting with the promise of big bucks down the line is the best approach.
In places like the UK getting more than a couple to turn up for a casting with ID is tough. Imagine if you paid to get to the casting or/and paid for the location and no one turns up with ID. In most of Western Europe they will carry ID, but still the problem is who and how many turn up. There are very few shooters in this business working in Western Europe.
So be prepared for more than one person turning up. Even if only one girls brings a friend you will have to have someone watch them as you shoot or you might lose some property.
7) Selling the content. Good luck selling it to customers like mchacal. Unless you can find 5 of them who will take all you churn out of the same girl set you're going to lose money. Even selling the same set 5 times at $500 it's tough to shoot an hour of content + 100 images for $500. It will need 3-5 scenes, the girl will want paying, then your expenses have to be met. If the girl does it for anything under $200 and you keep your expenses down you should clear $200 per shoot. Which can take half a day shooting 3-5 scenes. Girls tend not to want to be rushed from scene to scene what ever you pay them.
Sometimes none of these situations pop up and sometimes a few or more do. Experience has taught shooters how to deal with them. You will need to learn fast.
Can't think of anything else that might pop up in doing this work. If I do I will post it.
Waiting to see who agrees or disagrees.
