Great Advice From Five Professional Photographers

When you are new to photography, you can spend a lot of time practicing your technique and exploring your creativity, but there is no shortcut to experience. Thankfully, though, a lot of longtime professionals are quite happy to share the lessons they have learned over time. This excellent video features five successful professional photographers giving their best advice for new creatives.

Coming to you from Karl Taylor, this helpful video features five professionals discussing the best advice they would give to a new photographer. Personally, I thought the best piece of advice was knowing the technical side of your craft inside and out. If you do not understand your camera settings and the like deeply and without hesitation, you will devote brainpower to figuring them out during a shoot, and that will distract you from interacting with your subject. It also looks rather unprofessional. Beyond that, it is crucial to have a strong command of how to properly run a business. Plenty of talented photographers sadly fail in the professional realm simply because they are unprepared for the aspects of a photography business that don't involve being behind the camera. Check out the video above for lots of helpful tips. 

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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14 Comments

Remember it is art and business. What your spending. Clients come and go. Cash flows in and out. Be prepared to make a lot of money one year and little the next.

Real quick, are you summarizing the video or just adding points? I haven't watched it yet and only came to the comment to see if someone summarized and would save me the trouble of watching

adding points. The video was very good

Lol,... good one.
Thats like asking a friend that went to see a Rembrandt if he liked it and could he summarize his thoughts about it to save you the entry fee yourself (well, not exactly, but you get the point)...!

Misunderstood the intent, removed comment.

Well that's the problem with messages, you lose the "intent" of what was written without the delivery.
I wasn't upset or thought what you wrote was wrong or in any way bad, I was only finding humor in what you had said. I think we all go to the comments at times to get the jist of the article.

And in humor I was just relating on how what you said could be interpreted in relation to something else on the extreme end. If we were sitting at a bar stool having a drink, we both would be laughing our asses off.

No harm, no foul, sorry for what I wrote being taken the wrong way!

It's all good, appreciate the clarification as you didnt have to do that.

Remember to breathe and enjoy the ride. It is easy to get so caught up in the work that we forget to enjoy the journey.

Learn when to listen and when to ignore your clients. Learn when a layout is just a starting point to jump off from and when it is the endpoint, where that photo you have been hired to create is supposed to land.

market, market and then market some more

That's an understatement!
What a pain in the ass that part of the business is.

am i alone in thinking anyone who calls themself a "celebrity photog" is pretty lame.

Celebrity is a niche and legitimate market for photography. It refers to photographers whose primary practice is shooting portraits of celebrities. It is a very hard niche to break into since most celebrities guard their image (or images) very zealously.

interesting take on that Zave, thanks because ive never heard it broken down that way. but still pretty lame why not just a portrait photographer its similar to the person so says "my car is parked right out front vs my bmw is parked right out front"