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Photo Shoot or Photo Shooting

matthewsumol
As far as i understand, a SHOOTING is when guns are involved, and a SHOOT is when cameras do the work. However, one of my students from Miami told me they also use SHOOTING to refer to a photo shoot. Has anyone found this in the wild? Since in Miami english is not the first language of a lot of people, they may have this particular usage

3 comments

ElephantNo3640•
It’s a very ESL thing to say. If I read this in a transcript of speech with no other information, I’d assume the speaker was not a native English speaker.
that1LPdood•
You can use “shoot” or “shooting” equally for cameras or guns, depending on usage or how the sentence is constructed. Example: “This weekend I’m planning to go shoot my pistol.” Example: “This weekend I’m going to shoot some photos of the new bridge downtown.” In some cases, it can be ambiguous. The only way you would know if it’s a gun or a camera is through context. Example: “I’m going to go shooting downtown this weekend.” If the conversation was already talking about cameras or photography, then it would just be *understood* that “shooting” means photographing, and not shooting a gun.
wbenjamin13•
There are some dialects, like Filipino English where “a shooting” is a photoshoot, but this is not at all common in most of the major “prestige” dialects and is best avoided unless you live and work in a place where one of these dialects is dominant.