So, I was looking at this Kendall Jenner bikini photoshoot stuff the other day. You see these pictures, right? And they look so… easy. Like, oh, just stand there, look pretty. Done.
But that’s the trick, isn’t it? My “practice,” if you can even call it that, was mostly me trying to figure out what kind of black magic goes into making it look so simple. It’s not just grabbing a phone and snapping a pic, that’s for sure. I spent a good afternoon just trying to get the lighting right for a photo of my old sneakers I wanted to sell online. Sneakers! And it was a nightmare.
The Rabbit Hole
First, you start thinking, okay, location. They’re always in some crazy beautiful place. That’s not just stumbling upon a nice beach. Someone scouted that. Someone probably paid a ton for it. Then the actual bikini – probably costs more than my rent. And the hair, the makeup… a whole team, right?
- Stylists
- Makeup artists
- Hair people
- Lighting crew
- The photographer, obviously
- Probably a bunch of assistants running around
It’s a whole production. My “practice” quickly turned from “how do they do it?” to “wow, I would not want to organize that.” It’s like those cooking shows where they have 30 ingredients pre-chopped in tiny bowls. Yeah, looks easy when someone else does all the prep.
Now, why was I even spending my time thinking about this? That’s the real story, I guess. It kinda goes back to this old job I had. Not glamorous at all. We were trying to launch this new, super basic product. Like, a really, really plain t-shirt. And my boss, bless his heart, thought we could just “do some nice photos” ourselves. “Save some money,” he said.
So there I was, with a smartphone, a t-shirt, and my coworker Dave who was roped in to be the “model.” Dave is a great guy, but he’s more of a “likes to fix spreadsheets” model than a “sells t-shirts with his smoldering gaze” model. We tried the office. Fluorescent lighting. Looked like a police lineup. We tried outside. Too sunny. Too shady. A bird pooped near Dave. The t-shirt got a smudge of something unidentifiable.
It was a disaster. We spent a whole day, got maybe three usable photos, and they looked like they were taken for a lost-and-found poster. The boss was not pleased. He kept saying, “But those Instagram people make it look so easy!” Yeah, well, “those Instagram people” probably aren’t using Dave and an iPhone in a windy parking lot.
So, whenever I see these super polished photoshoots, like the Kendall Jenner ones, I don’t just see the picture. I see the chaos that must have happened behind the scenes to make it look so calm and perfect. All the planning, all the people, all the things that probably went wrong that we don’t see. My little “practice” was just a tiny glimpse into that world, and honestly, it makes me appreciate my current gig where the most I have to photograph is a boring spreadsheet on my screen. And even that, sometimes, the lighting is just… off.
