What the heck... Lets talk about OMP!

[Al_Nowak]

Originally Posted by jford

Seems to me - not that I have real experience attracting models - that you ought to be asking this of models, not photographers. .

Perhaps... The thing is you'd be collecting a very limited number of opinions, and it'd be real easy to have a skewed result because of the limited sample. Of course, you can argue that asking photographers runs the same risk, but there are a lot more photographers HERE than models...

If as you say, you have no experience attracting models, I might be tempted to ask how you DO find models... but I won't.

Originally Posted by jford

You might try asking this of models who've worked with you. But I tend to think that RFS's approach - be upfront and approach models directly if you want to work with them - is more likely to lead to sessions.

I do approach models directly. I am not sure whether RFS means approaching potential models on the model web sites, or on the street though. My experience in doing 'on the street' approaches has been only slightly successful.

What I am asking about is techniques that improve the "Desire to Work With" hits. Having good images is the obvious first step, but even if you have good images, are there strategies that can improve the hit ratio. Having a LOT of images posted seems to be a factor.

[Dax]

It is way too easy to attract girls from OMP for free shoots, but to have them pay.. pretty much impossible....

I hate OMP... it's only good if u want to shoot a girl nude... besides that.. it's crap!

I had a gold membership, and now left it at bronze... Just to have a link to my site for google reasons..

[RHWeiner]

I have had Bronze for years and finally last year decided to swallow and lay down the cash for the Silver level...only because it allows me extra images (and some 'freebies' sent to me...tshirt, etc. [discussed once in an earlier thread[). I haven't taken advantage of the extra images yet...too damn lazy to get around to it, for the moment...but I don't think I've had any models come directly to me without me first going to them. Well, maybe I should rethink that...I've had a few 'pros' contact me asking if I had any paid work. Yeah right...so who's going to pay me, instead?

So most of my OMP activity has been to contact them with a 'desire'. Actually I did that a lot in the beginning and was wondering why I was not getting even "Thanks, but no" responses. When I emailed Brent (?) about this he told me that typically there was a 10% return rate...so 1 out of 10! That sucks. And of those that responded I had a handful of No-Shows. THOSE really burned my butt as they not only didn't show up, they didn't even send an email or make a call to my cell to explain! Flakes!

Now, don't get me wrong, I have had a few really good experiences but those were few and far between. So I'm getting to that point of asking 'on the street'. I might have better luck that way?

Good luck and percerverence [sp]...you'll need it.

[Al_Nowak]

Originally Posted by Dax

I hate OMP... it's only good if u want to shoot a girl nude... besides that.. it's crap!

And exactly what did you do to improve the situation?

I hear a lot of "I hate OMP" comments, but nobody ever does anything to change it. I'm not saying getting them to change is going to be easy, but if there are real issues that can be legitimately addressed, did you even try?

Or are your issues really with the wannabe sometime models who don't answer emails, expect $100/hour with no experience, do no-shows, etc.?

There are a lot of things I don't particularly like about OMP, but most of them relate to how specific individuals use it.

I think they do a pretty good job of doing what they say they are going to do... providing a venue. My OMP page shows up consistently (as apparently yours does...), my images display reasonably well, and I get notifications of new models. Can you reasonably expect them to run background checks on everybody, monitor their emails for responses, chastise the impolite, drop the models who no-show and have unreasonable expectations, and in general act like Big Brother? I don't think so...