shatterkiss
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My pleasure!
I wanted to reiterate one thing, something that Byron (bka20d) reminded me about yesterday in a PM - I'm mostly speaking from the perspective of working with major-market fashion agencies like you would find in NYC, LA, Miami, Chicago, London, Paris, Tokyo, Milan, etc. The situation may well be different in second-tier markets (places like Dallas, Houston, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Minneapolis that are either served by regional agencies or outposts of the majors) and will certainly be different in third-tier markets that don't have a national or international fashion/media community. Look at it this way: if you don't have the clients and you don't have the media, then you aren't going to have the agencies that serve them. You may have the modeling talent, but it's going to get scouted and exported to the markets where they'll actually be able to work.
My direct experience and what I've been told by models in tertiary markets implies that there just isn't the same culture of testing in those places, much like agencies aren't signing models and then developing their portfolios for them or collaboratively...they look for models with established portfolios (whereas a major agency will take girls based on a walk-in audition and Polaroids) who will be arranging their own testing and portfolio development.
In a NYC or LA an agency will have no problem filling your print and web portfolios with images from tests with their models, and they'll be doing the same with your images. Paper is rarely exchanged, even if they're hiring you for paid tests...it's more likely they'll just establish a standing rate with you and pick up the phone, "we've got five new girls that we need to test, can we send them over tomorrow? Invoice us the usual." I know that threads on this board are full of posts (some of them by me!) saying "get contracts, get it on paper, don't do anything on a handshake" but the reality is that lots of business is still done verbally and on handshakes. It can be nervewracking and awkward, but it is what it is. However, in places where models are being hired for hundreds instead of thousands of dollars, and the work is more likely local or things like live promotions and car shows, there's less incentive for an agency to have a testing booker on staff and be managing portfolio cultivation. I recently had an agency model in Houston tell me during a shoot that she had to fight with her agency just to get them to put her new images up on their website, let alone help her arrange tests.
If you're in one of those small, regional markets you might be better off using resources like OMP and Model Mayhem for your portfolio development or just sucking it up and paying a model a couple hundred bucks with the expectation of getting three or four new portfolio images out of a couple of different setups.
If you're planning on courting commercial clients you should really consider your own portfolio an investment in every way, from the packaging to the images it contains. It's the wrong place to go cheap.
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