An Honest Look at Your Chances of Being a Professional Photographer

I was so influenced by your words, that I had to set-up an account, so that I could post a comment. I was given a camera when I was 13 and have been a want-to-be photographer since...I will be 65 in September.

Thank you for your honesty and the words of encouragement. I look forward to what I can learn from the Fstopper community.

In my youth, I tried to be a professional photographer. But I was disappointed in my work and in the quality of customers that I was serving. So I went into computers, the customers were just as bad, I think but the money was better, so it worked for me..

I am comfortable with my choice and status as an amateur. I shoot what I want, and process it the way I want. I think I am now a better photographer than I was back then.

The problem with making a career in this industry is that so much of it depends on blind luck.

Now sure, talent and hard work, perseverance and investment, time and patience... these are all factors - but you can have all these and have almost no success as a pro.

You'll get bland comments like "network" or "have great SEO / portfolio / people skills" etc, but let's not forget that most of these videos by successful people have found a niche in a market and have been fortunate to have connected with a client who needs a lot of work.

I've been there. I had a market with uber-wealthy clients for their private parties and portraits. The sort of client base that you just can't introduce yourself to because they have people-who-have-people. I was lucky in that a chance encounter with a one-off job, unrelated to photography got me an introduction at the exact moment a billionaire happened to need some images taken for his 4 yr old's birthday party. (When you're a billionaire - those parties can be grand affairs).

And so I was "in." I rode that train for 10 years. Don't get me wrong, I'm good. My work was better than most and I grafted hard. But if I'd been somewhere else on that chance encounter, those 10 years of lucrative jobs would have never been there - no matter how hard I'd tried or how good I was.

And this is true of the commercial world. I've had chance encounters with a director who happened to be busy - and we got along. I may not have been the best, but he liked me. And he was busy - so I was busy. He had good clients so I could charge high fees.

But it could have been very different... We might have met, but what if he wasn't busy, or what if he didn't have high-end jobs? Very different story.

My best friend is an award winning editor. She has a single main client who keeps her employed 40 weeks a year and together they make amazing documentaries that win all sorts of stuff. But before she happened on a chance meeting with him, (and he's not easy to get hold of otherwise), she was struggling with lower-end corporate work. Is she talented? Absolutely. Has she earned her place - of course. But she'll admit her career could have been a disaster without that one unplanned meeting.

I used to be very successful. Work just flowed to my door. I didn't even have a presence on google - it didn't matter.

But an injury and then Covid took me out of the game just long enough - and so I'm out. 4 hrs a day on the phone, writing emails, sending portfolios, networking, having first class SEO and a great little website gets me nowhere. (It's very different here in the UK that over in the US for many of you readers).

Because without another "fortunate" introduction, I'm not making headway. I've made contacts, but they're not busy, or they don't have great budgets - and so I languish, waiting and trying.

People say to "adapt or die" and I've done that in spades. Over Covid lockdowns, I taught myself TV grading (I have 25+ yrs in the TV industry), and managed to get work as lighting supervisor for a studio for a bit.

I invested in Tilt Shift optics and a few extras - and taught myself how to shoot architecture. (I'm a quick study and I worked my a** off to refine my skills. So adapt...? Yep, been there...

All this is to say that with all the photographic and business skills in the world, unless you have a great chunk of luck to go with, you may flail at the starting block.

So - do you feel lucky... punk. Do you...?

All right, I look at it this way: what do a professional driver, photographer, butcher, carpenter etc. have in common? They do it for money! It doesn't matter what they can do. As long as the customer pays for the service, they are professionals. Why the customer pays one more and the other less often has less to do with skill and more to do with ability. Namely, being able to deal with the customer. If you can't do that, you won't be able to make a living in the long run. And yes, they exist, the beautiful ones, the quite famous ones, the top of the top. Here it is usually worthwhile to study their biography. Why did these people become so famous?

Somewhere there was a point for most of them when they changed tracks. If you don't go off the track, you fall by the wayside! And that didn't always have to do with a certain talent for the thing. Often it was the coincidence of an acquaintance ... but well, that's legitimate.

The opposite of the professional is the amateur. They do it out of passion (amare means to love something). An amateur is not dependent on money from this passionate love. He usually invests much more time and money than the professional. And in the vast majority of cases, amateurs produce better performances/results.
And then there is the consumer. They do it because it is practical. They don't put any passion into what they do. They don't want money for what they do. They just do it because it suits them. Whether it's taking a selfie with a mobile phone or quickly programming a Marco ... he is not a (professional) photographer or a (professional) software developer.

Now everyone just has to decide for themselves which category they belong to and then just be happy :-)