Stock Photography Made Me Famous

Well, kinda....

One of the bookings I got on this particular season in Miami was for an international stock photography giant. I shot for two days with the team in locations ranging from hotel lobbies, to all white seamless sets and tropical Floridian beaches. Some shots were solo and some in groups or with a guy and all were pretty fresh, fun.....the typical "Look at me, I looooove being alive!" kind of stuff. Cheese, and well, I can do cheese.

For industry outsiders, I have to explain what stock photography is. Stock is when a series of different people, locations, items, stills, etc, are shot and them put up for sale for clients of major and minor companies alike to choose from. In essence, these companies/clients can browse through the on-line catalogs of any number of stock photography companies to choose and purchase a shot that best sells their product, be it a rose petal with an artfully placed drop of dew on it, or a couple jumping in the air while eating a slice of pizza. This type of shot saves companies tons of money since they don't have to pay for an entire photoshoot themselves. Stock works great for the clients but for the models....well.....the money is nice for the amount of work you do, but when you start seeing yourself everywhere you start adding up what you could have potentially made had you been hired for each and every client that is using your images. And that can get depressing.

So, back to my story....I shot my ass off, had a blast, got paid and that was that. Or so I thought. Starting at about 6 months after I did this shoot up until about a year ago I started getting phone calls and emails from family & friends all over the world telling me that they had seen me on billboards, magazines, store window displays, brochures and magazine ads. When describing what I was doing in these shots (and I even got some sent to me by a couple of friends) I knew instantly that these ads had all been bought from the stock compilation that I had shot.

I was seen on billboards for Spain's Tourism Board in Amsterdam, billboards in the Canary Islands for a resort, had a huge window display on the East Coast for Sprint PCS, ended up on the cover of a Circuit City weekly flyer as well as a flyer for Adelphia Cable (which I believe is now part of Comcast, holy monopoly) had large ads up in most major American airports for a Caribbean tourism campaign, appeared on a billboard in Mexico for God knows what (my friend was driving back to California from Tijuana and saw my billboard) and even ended up in a half page ad at the back of Cosmopolitan magazine for ...oh God, I can't believe I am gonna divulge this to the world.....KY Jelly. Yeah....that one was mortifying beyonds words. There I was shooting on a beach with a male model, super cheesy smiles plastered on our faces.....little did we know we would end up in an ad for a personal lubricant. Have mercy.

So, yeah, with the amount of billboards and ads I got out of this job I should technically be both rich and famous. But, alas, it was just stock....and therefore I just got my normal day rate and the titillation of hearing a friend halfway across the world tell me she had just seen me on a huge billboard. *sigh*