The Habits That Separate Working Photographers From the Rest

Talent gets discussed constantly, but the photographers who keep landing work tend to share a set of habits that have nothing to do with raw skill. The difference shows up in how they practice, prepare, and handle the people around them.

Drawing on nearly 20 years as an editorial and commercial photographer and years running a production company in Vietnam, Justin Mott breaks down the traits he looks for when he hires. The first one sounds obvious: exceptional photographers shoot even when no one is paying them. Personal projects become the lab where you test ideas and make mistakes without a client watching. Mott points to a self-funded project on the last two northern white rhinos, work that gave his career new meaning and taught him storytelling techniques he later carried into commercial jobs. You don't need a trip to Kenya to do this, and he's blunt about the reason many early-career shooters stay unpaid: they aren't practicing enough.

Preparation runs close behind. Mott doesn't show up hoping for the best, and on his New York Times assignments, he built plans A, B, and C before he needed them, with a backup for the backup in case access fell through or weather turned. Taking chances comes next, and here he tells the story of a shoot that started at 4:00 a.m. because he pitched an idea he was scared to present to a brand new client. He sold himself on it first, then sold them, and six years later that client is still his biggest, still referring to that single image. Communication ties these together, and he draws a hard line between being talkative and communicating well. A shoot in Vanuatu, where a local team insisted on a friend as the lead model against his advice, turned into a lesson in documenting decisions clearly and then fixing the problem without an "I told you so."

Two more traits round out the list. Exceptional photographers surround themselves with people better than they are, and Mott is candid about his own limits. He isn't a top retoucher, so he hires one and builds it into his quotes. He calls himself a simple man with camera menus, part of why he gravitates toward Leica and has shot Hasselblad and Sony, while his assistant handles the buried settings that would otherwise pull him out of the creative flow. Then there's the open mind. In the Maldives, a last-minute setup on a patch of white sand was about to fall apart on timing when the model suggested running off the catamaran onto the beach. It worked, the client was happy, and Mott banked the idea. On a later shoot for the same client, a stiff posed family on a chair came alive when he had them play tag around it, an image that ran in a global ad campaign and got renewed during COVID.

The through-line worth pulling out is that most of these habits are really about building a reputation that travels ahead of you. Photography runs heavily on referrals, and the industry has only gotten smaller as producers, art directors, and agencies talk to each other across markets. When Mott turned down a fixer's offer to stage a scene in Indonesia, the writer he was working with never even saw it happen. He heard about it later, mentioned it to an editor, and that quiet decision led to years of assignments. The practical takeaway is that your conduct on a shoot is being logged by people you may never pitch directly, so the way you treat a nervous model, a green client, or a crew member at 4:00 a.m. becomes part of your portfolio whether you intend it or not. Treating professionalism as a marketing asset rather than a chore is one of the more useful reframes a working photographer can adopt.

That last trait, acting professionally in every part of the job, is the one Mott says he can't coach. Be early, plan for the worst, and treat everyone with kindness, because everyone is watching how you respond to pressure. He puts it plainly: if your default setting is to be difficult, at least learn to bury that side of yourself, since it's the one thing experience alone won't fix.

Watch the full breakdown in the video above for the assignment stories and the specifics behind each trait.