Can someone tell me why models are so in demand? Can’t people remix existing photos and so on? There are tons of stock photos now too. It’s not like they need a new model for every time they show a watch.
What's considered aesthetically pleasing continually evolves over time. There are underlying trends in physical beauty that resemble what we see in fashion, art, music, etc. Humans also have a quite a lot of control over much of their appearance with hair styling, makeup, and (increasingly) cosmetic surgery. This, combined with the ageism inherent to modeling, adds up to fairly sustained demand.
> Can someone tell me why models are so in demand? Can’t people remix existing photos and so on? There are tons of stock photos now too. It’s not like they need a new model for every time they show a watch.
Usage rights.
Time of models and photographers is cheap - for below supermodel catwalk class it is less than $150/h including the overhead. For catalog/commercial models $50/h including overhead is a good pay.
Buying out of usage rights is expensive. Worldwide buyout for a dozen images for 1 years could easily be $50,000. So instead they get those 12 images for that specific usage type (online) for the time rate + $1
Having a good model can set your photos apart from stock photos, even if they are doctored a bit. This is especially important if you don't have someone on hand with good photoshop skills (which is probably also in demand).
I guess this is all dependent on how "in demand" models are...
That's kind of how it works these days. Photographers take a single photo of a model wearing a particular style of outfit and other similar outfits are photoshopped in.
So, instead to taking a photo for each outfit and for each variant of the outfit, they just take one.
