Taking Pictures with Reality Show Celebrities. Does it help?
Taking pictures with a celebrity is a recent trend where participants pay money to the organiser and in return organiser arranges a celebrity and give 2-3 minutes time to get a picture taken with that celebrity. It is usually a big event with 50-60 participants. These celebrities are not that famous, they might be reality show stars or one time musicians. Most often these people have taken pictures in a well planned co-ordinated event where a celebrity will come to a particular location and anyone who wants to take a picture with that celebrity will pay money to the organiser of that event and get their pictures clicked by a professional photographer. The organisers charge anywhere between $50 (3000 INR) to $100 (INR 6000) depends upon the popularity of that celebrity. Editing of pictures is also included in that price.
Benefit of these kinds of shoot is that celebrity gets paid hefty amount for a shoot which hardly requires any effort and benefit of the organiser is that they make profit out of the difference between what participant pays and what they pay celebrity. In my conversation with one of such organisers, I came to know that these celebrities are paid $1500 to $2500 (INR 1 lakh to 2 lakh) and in such a shoot there will be around 60 to 70 participants. So, if we do the math we can understand that the organiser makes a profit of around $1000 ( INR 50,000). There are additional expenses like location rent, equipment rent, photographer fees, editing charges etc.. but most of the organisers will not care about quality of the output and hence such expenses are negligible.
Anyway the point of this discussion is not to blame the organisers. But, to analyse whether it make sense to take pictures with celebrities. Most of the participants in these events are males and not all of them are interested in modelling or an acting career. Some just want to take a picture with celebrity and post it on their Facebook and Instagram. While others are seriously interested in having a career in modelling and they think pictures like these will help them in modelling career. Truth to be said, these kind of pictures will not only help them, but most of the time it will backfire. Because, your portfolio is supposed to represent you and your talent. Portfolio is not a place to show who you are with or who you knows. Besides, most of the professionals in the industry will understand that you paid to get these pictures taken with celebrities. It will come off as a desperate attempt to impress others. However, if your intention is to just post it on Facebook and get a few days of fame, then go ahead by all means. Because, nothing is wrong with having a picture taken with celebrity.
Female celebrities are more popular and participants tends to pay more for females. Generally the crowd for these shoots are skewed towards males. In most shoots, 80 percent of the participants will be males and only 20 percent of them will be females. Another interesting thing is that mostly these participants are from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities even though the shoot might be conducted in a Tier 1 metro city. Participants tends to travel for hours in train and bus to reach the location and some even travel entire night on a train to get the picture taken with celebrity. I can understand their logic if the intention is just to get fame in their village or in their friend circle, but if anyone is thinking they can get a break in film/fashion