I’ve been looking for new models who live along the highways that I’ll be venturing on my next road trip from Montana to Florida. Normally I like to bring musical instruments with me but I’m flying there so I’m traveling light. I could always order a ukulele from Amazon after I get off the plane. Hmph. It’s strange looking for models. I use instagram mostly for this. I used to use modelmayhem which has a good search feature but no one seems to be using that any more. It’s hard to be heard posting a comment or sending a DM among the noise.
I’ve had girls respond to my casting calls and ask for details of the shoot and I tell them and they say no thanks. I’m not sure why. I don’t ask. This one girl recently, I had offered to pay her and it was at a nice location, and no nudity and she said no. This was after she asked for details. I guess it’s kind of like the way people ask “is this item still available?” and then they aren’t interested. (lol) Anyway, it’s a lot of work planning for a road trip and trying to hunt down models using the extremely limited tools online we have today. You can’t search by location, age etc on any platforms. That’s pretty much a security issue. You are limited to your network and even then, only a few of them will ever see any travel notices you post. So it’s like I have to do door to door solicitation, and I’m the ARTIST! So it sucks. But it does give me the chance to choose specific faces based on my biases and perpetuate my small visual bubble of preferences even more so than having random friends hitting me up with enthusiasm. Mostly because, like many other photographers, and models, we get banned, deleted and hacked and have to start over like one might who has their house burn down in a california wild fire. Your network is everything. And mind has not only burned down, but the remains of it are still online and they don’t go to me, they go nowhere. I can’t even edit most of the content that’s still up on other places on the web. That’s the nature of this new internet world full of hackers and bots.
Besides fighting all those internet social limitations, we still have to create. That’s about 5% of the effort that we get to apply our energies and resources to. The rest is supporting the infrastructure.
