Things They Don’t Tell You About Being A Professional Photographer
In almost every hobby in the world there’s a divide between the ‘pro’s’ and the enthusiasts/semi-pro’s/amateurs. Sometimes that’s the kind of measurable difference we see in Sports, where professionals are defined by their performances. Sometimes however the differences aren’t quite as tangible. In photography the difference between ‘Professionals’ – those earning a living through their images – and everyone else is pretty hard to define other than the simple fact that the pro’s make money from their photography. Or I guess maybe it’s the amount of money made that differentiates the two, after all, with a platform like Steemit at our fingertips we’re seeing all kinds of people earning money from their photography. Hell, some of my favourite Steemians aren’t pro’s at all! During this article I want to look at a few misconceptions often taken on my newcomers and why, during my 8 years as a pro I have left each of those misconceptions behind.
Looking For The Magic Beans
I remember when I first caught the photography bug, I’ve talked about it before here on Steemit but for me it was the first time I’d found a form of creative expression that really resonated with me. In other words I couldn’t draw, writing seemed like too much effort and my musical talents were non-existent. I used to religiously read Amateur Photographer magazine every week, pouring over each page for tips, tricks and inspiration. I loved that I’d found an ‘art’ that could be learned and where a voracious passion for knowledge would actually improve my practical application of the skill I was working on.
Like most people starting out I was looking for anything I could to fast-track my evolution as a photographer, desperately seeking the ‘Magic beans’! One of the things we’ve spoken about at conferences is that there really is no ‘one size fits all’ trick to getting better at photography. Bar one of course;
*Persistence* There might not be one magic bullet of a trick that I can give you, but I’ve certainly picked up a few things along the way which I wish I’d learned earlier. Some of them you might have already worked out, others might be new. Everyone’s different, but with any luck a few of these might just give you that little edge and bump your photography up a notch or two.
Big Balls and Bullshit
One of my best friends, @alexabbottphoto, coined this term a while back, we met years ago at a wedding fair when we were both new to the industry. Surrounded by seasoned professionals seemingly intent on marking their territory we were the ‘newbies’ in our area. Half the age of all the other wedding photographers at the fair we quickly became friends with a shared desire to prove ourselves in the industry. We took different routes when it came to learning, @vtravels and I never really thought about seminars or workshops but Alex did take the time to learn from more seasoned heads. About a year or two into our journeys we were discussing the industry and what he had learned from the professionals who’s workshops he had visited. He summed it up in just 4 words. *Big Balls and Bullshit* What do we mean by that? Well it simply means that most of what you read online is fabricated or at the very least exaggerated. Hell, in the years since I’ve done it myself on countless occasions! I remember spending years trying to work out how a particular photographer had shot a wedding for £35,000 – a claim he made to almost anyone who would listen. I even sent in an enquiry to his website under an alias only to find his prices were less than 10% of the quoted £35,000, so how the hell did he charge someone £35k?! Over the last couple of years selling albums and prints has become big business, and I have been able to speak to some of the worlds leading print sellers on just this subject. Again, stories of £10,000+ print sales abound. Yet each time I ask someone to detail exactly what they sold to hit that figure they draw a blank. It’s as if it’s a contest of who can come up with the most ridiculous number and have people believe it!
So No Crazy Pay Days?
Now I have no idea which crazy pay day stories are true and which aren’t. I have my suspicions, but one thing I now KNOW, without any hesitation or deliberation, is that most of the crazy stories you read are just that – stories. Designed to propel a self-perpetuated ‘legend’ and solidify a photographers ‘brand’. Personally I hate all of the money talk when it comes to photography, but ‘Bullshit’ is really just another term for self-promotion. I’m not saying you need to go out there and claim to have sold a print for over a million or say you’ve just bought a new house courtesy of one foolish client. What I’m saying is that you need to embrace the Bullshit part of marketing. It’s something that I struggled with for years, so much so we actually hired two industry experts to re-write the text on our website. The text they wrote was fantastic, but made me feel supremely arrogant reading it through. When we talked about it with the writers they asked us ‘why not say that? You’ve won the awards, you have all of the ‘proof’ you need, being humble won’t attract clients!’.
Embrace The Arrogance
How right they were! I started looking around at photographers in our local area, something I hadn’t done for years, only to see totally unknown photographers claiming to be industry leading pioneers. Yet here we were - having been asked to speak at conferences, to shoot worldwide and seeing our name in plenty of ‘Worlds Best Photographer’ lists – afraid to toot our own horns a bit! So THAT is the first tip. Don’t be ‘that photographer’ who’s claims are so ludicrous they become universally mocked, but don’t be afraid to embellish a little! Be bold, be confident and the potential clients will see that confidence.
Pro’s Use Presets
I was actually having this discussion with a fellow Steemian just recently, @eveuncovered had just bought a new laptop and I was offering some tips on Lightroom. When it came to Presets she was reluctant to use ‘off the shelf’ presets (The likes of VSCO and RadLabs spring to mind). Now this I totally get, it feels like cheating right? Again, I’m not saying you HAVE to use presets, but personally when I was starting out in photography just creating the images was hard enough, then I had to edit them too? We’re talking some 13 years ago here, so presets weren’t what they are now and unfortunately I had to learn the hard way but in this day and age there are some AWESOME presets out there made by people who have dedicated thousands of hours to EDITING. Remember being a great editor and a great photographer don’t always go hand in hand! I will say that Eve’s idea of making her own presets is a great way to go and in many ways much more authentic than using off the shelf presets. That said this one is really down to how much time you WANT to spend editing. If you’re someone who doesn’t relish the idea of spending hours editing then don’t feel like you have to. You can search online and find so many presets out there that you can pretty much get one that fits your style perfectly. Alternatively make your own, go through an edit to get your ‘look’ and save the alterations as a preset. This is something that’s not only a great time saver, but it also helps to maintain a ‘look’ and keep your images consistent. Sure, it’s great to mess around with Photoshop and Lightroom and try out new editing styles, but ultimately 99% of the great photographers out there have a recognisable ‘look’ to their images! It's one of those funny paradoxes, enthusiasts and amateurs spend hours on end perfecting their images. Most of the time Pro’s get them done. The truth is that being a pro changes a lot, and editing is something that goes from being a nice way to get creative, to just another part of the process. We know how we want our images to look so we get them looking right as efficiently as possible.
’Pro’ Lenses – The Myth
Yep, Pro Lenses are absolutely lovely, I remember how badly I wanted that red ring around my lenses. Hell, I’d probably have painted one on if I’d have gotten away with people thinking I was rocking a ‘pro’ lens. Suffice to say the prohibitive cost of ‘Pro’ lenses was somewhat out of my reach, instead I put all of my Nerdy tendencies to good use and meticulously researched lenses. I looked at MTF charts and read reviews, charted the lenses out based on a price to performance ratio. The funny thing is the results showed pretty much the same as most other industries around the world. Diminishing returns. What do I mean by that? Well let’s take a look at Canon’s 50mm lenses (I’m going to keep this simple and just look at Canon lenses and prices on WEX). At one end of the spectrum we have the super cheap 50mm f/1.8, a steal at just £106. At the other end of the scale we could go for the 50mm f/1.2 L for a mere £1272 (Yep, a bargain at £287 off retail!). In the ‘Middle’ we have the 50mm f/1.4 for £349. Is the L Lens 10 times better than the 1.8? Hell no! Is it 4 times better than the 1.4? NO! Look at the 70-200 series lenses and you’ll see the same diminishing returns in effect. Now of course, if money is no issue, those L lenses are friggin beautiful, but would I shoot exclusively with L lenses? Definitely not. The 50mm f/1.4 is my lens of choice, why? Because it’s HALF the weight of the 1.2, a QUARTER of the price and equally as sharp. Am I prepaired to pay £900 and the additional weight for 1/3 of a stop? Nope! Sure, L lenses CAN be super sharp, they can also be much better value than the 50mm 1.2 – the 135mm f/2 is a fantastic example of that, but most of the time it’s only marginal!
Seriously, Get Over The Lenses
Not just the lenses, the kit in general. Trust me, I get it, I’m a fully signed up camera geek, I love it! But I’ve also learned to accept over the years that the only person who will notice the difference is you! In fact we built a whole business, shooting over 100 weddings, with a couple of Canon Rebel bodies (550d’s if you’re curious), 50mm 1.8 lenses and a couple of cheap 17-50mm 2.8 Tamron lenses! Hell, our photos graced the pages of industry magazines worldwide and won more awards than I can count. Trust me, nobody could tell we were shooting with consumer grade gear! The truth is that you have to think with your wallet, and Pro’s know that better than anyone. When photography becomes your business you HAVE to justify that extra £900 for the L lens, or that extra £1500 for an increased frame rate. The only person who will ever see the difference in the photos is you. IF you have a ridiculously keen eye! So what do I suggest? Think with your head, not your heart! I wanted an Astro photography lens recently, fortunately the Samyang/Rokinon 14mm 2.8 comes with fairly universal praise for it’s low Coma and is widely regarded as the best lens in the world for Astro Photography. Sure, it’s nor particularly sexy, but at £200 it’s a hell of a lot easier to justify than the Canon 14mm 2.8 at closer to £2000! In fact even if their coma performances were reversed, I’d still have a hard time paying ten times the price when I know I can get something MORE than adequate for a couple of hundred quid. Same goes for the cheap walkabout lenses I picked up for my Olympus, £40 and £80 respectively and covering a range of 14-40 and 40-150mm. Sure, the ‘Pro’ versions are much better, but I can make do with a few stops less light, and I guarantee nobody online will ever notice the difference!
Pro’s Screw Up
This one took me a while to fully appreciate. I was never naïve enough to believe that every shot that goes onto a Pro’s camera is a stunner, but I didn’t ever fully appreciate that most of the time, if you put two photographers side by side with the same gear, there won’t be a huge delta in the work they produce. There’s no denying that a certain amount of what we do as photographers comes down to luck. Whether that’s the particularly photogenic and emotional couple that every wedding photographer adores, or the universe deciding to grace you with some spectacular light. It’s easy to look at the best professional images and feel woefully inadequate. One thing I tell photographers all the time in talks or in mentorship programs is not to look at a photo and be so in awe that you can’t be objective. Put yourself in that photographers position, with their kit, would the image you could have produced in the situation be so radically different? Most of the time it’s a resounding NO. Most of the time the difference between ‘Them’ and you is that you’re only seeing their best work. For every heart stoppingly romantic moment I’ve ever captured there have been a dozen images either side of it where the bride or groom looked like they were gurning away on Acid. Curation is one of the most crucial parts of being a photographer, controlling WHAT goes out into the world and ensuring that only your best images are seen by the client. Hell, if we’re talking about weddings we’re an industry based on 40-50 image blog posts or single award winning shots. On a normal wedding day we’ll shoot somewhere around 6000-7000 images and deliver 600-700 to the client. Roughly a 10% ‘hit rate’. Of the remaining 6-700 images we’ll put around 50 on our blog. That’s less than 1% of what we shoot on a wedding day!
Improve Your Odds
So we know curation is key, putting out your best content to the world, but let’s look again at the ‘luck’ aspect of photography. If we accept that a part of photography – no matter how big – is luck, then the way to improve our odds is to shoot more right? It’s like entering a raffle, each image is a ticket, and each image has the chance to be a winner. I’m not talking about ‘Spray and Pray’ shooting. I don’t mean just go out and leave your camera shooting 4k on the basis that you’ll eventually have a still that looks spectacular (Although you WILL, after all, a million monkeys on a million typewriters would eventually write Shakespear right?). What I mean is giving yourself every chance of success. That might be in the form of shooting more frames. If I’m shooting and find a scene, wedding or otherwise, that I like, I’ll line up the shot and wait. I’ve found the shot I want, but I want as many raffle tickets as possible. I’ll capture as many images as possible from that angle to make SURE I nail the shot. If it’s people we’re talking about then numbers become even more important, tiny things like facial expressions and blinking are often out of our control!
Get Out There And Shoot!
Never has my usual blog post sign off been more appropriate. When I talk about ‘improving your odds’, I don’t just mean taking more images of the same scene. I mean going on more adventures, planning more shoots, and photographing more things! Professionals have the added advantage of HAVING to take photos. I’ve shot a little over 300 weddings now, even just in terms of numbers that’s pretty massively improving my odds! You might not be getting paid to go out and shoot but since you have a Steemit account you probably are getting something for your images! The more shoots you can get out on the more chance you’ll encounter that once in a lifetime moment, or that perfect light that we see in magazines. Getting ‘good’ technically is all well and good, but it’s not much good knowing how to take a shot if you’re sat on the sofa while there’s an epic sunset happening outside or a political gathering going on in the city! We might not all be able (or particularly WANT) to get out to conflict zones, but if we look at some of the worlds greatest photojournalist images it’s not really about the photographer at all. It’s about being there. Turning up and doing your best. The Universe will see to the rest!
Don't Forget To Enter The #weddingcontest
You may not already be following but I've created @weddingcontest where I hold a weekly Wedding Photography contest with a 1 SBD Prize! All Steem/SBD is kept within the account to improve it's upvoting power and increase the prize. As this community grows I can't wait to get this prize up as big as possible! Let's build a real Wedding Photographers community here on Steemit!
Thanks for reading! As always, I'm more than happy to answer questions and I always love to hear your viewpoints on these articles and the ideas shared!
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Very nice post. Really enjoyed it. Always wondered what being a “pro photographer” actually means, ...now I know it doesn’t mean a whole lot;)
Also, love the photos (pun intended;)
Haha happy to help, and yep, it doesn't mean a whole lot at all! It's really not a measure of skill, rather a measure of how financially dependent you are on it!!
Thanks dude :) Really appreciate that! I felt like wedding images would work best for this one!
I'm about as amateur a photographer as it gets. This was a great article to help me understand what I should be thinking and doing as I take photos of my travels and events. Thanks so much for putting this post together. Really appreciate it.
I am only a point and shoot, smart phone photographer at the moment and I feel the same way!
I have others that I love, particularly music, but I am a very visual person and found myself envious of the re-explorations of the experiences a friend had taken in when editing his images. I wanted to take my 90+ grandma up to the summits of mountains I climb, or showing her a new perspective of her beloved rose bush. I am taking this post as a nudge to take more pictures while I learn about photography so I can practice as I learn more. Thanks to folks like @skiesandsports and Steemit, I never have to quit learning :)
Thanks! That's awesome to hear! I really hope that in these articles I can just share a few ideas to make people think if nothing else!
You're welcome! Really glad you enjoyed it and I do hope you find it helpful!
Haha, thanks for the mention and making me look a little snobbish😝
Haha, totally not my intention! It’s Something I can really relate to having spent hours editing single images in the past! Not snobbish, just conscientious, and that’s the kind of attribute that makes you improve!
Very interesting article and lots of nice tips. This BS thing I think applies to any form of creative work. You need to put yourself out there and often have to BS your way in to these big jobs or projects. Learning as you go is the best way! Keep up the good work :D
Haha yep, the BS thing applies to any form of creative work and just about everything else in life!
A very good read and one that I can certainly relate to. Something another photographer told me once (while in the thick of editing with a que that looked un-accomplishable) was to edit (and shoot) for the client, not other photographers. Meaning, while we may notice that L-series lens, or perfect dodging and burning etc etc, the client will notice the moment and emotion. Anyways, very good advice. I especially liked the part about getting started with the canon rebel. It's exactly what i did too. I always felt inferior at weddings where some of the guests had better cameras than me, but I had to tell myself it didn't matter if they didn't know how to use them.
Thanks! You're absolutely right, it's so easy to look at things from the eye of a professional photographer instead of our clients!
Haha I remember that feeling! One wedding in particular, I had my 550D and some guest was rocking a 1D and 70-200. I felt about two inches tall until I remembered that I was getting paid for it and he wasn't! Screw it, it just makes the images even more impressive when you remember it's 'amateur' equipment!
I really like these photos!
Thanks @goodvibrations! That's awesome to hear! My landscapes tend to do 'better' on Steemit but since this one was all about my professional work I thought I'd use my professional images!
So informative!! Thanks for this post, I’ve always wondered about taking my portrait photography to that semi pro level, definitely are a lot of considerations. I also love making personal presets in Lightroom! Great post
Thank you @polebird! And Thanks so much for the re-steem! I wondered how this one had earned so much more than my usual posts! Also, I think you may well have bumped me up to rep 57! I was watching last night and ended up heading to bed when it was at 56.999!
Yeah, there really is a lot to consider, and I think the first thing I'd consider is do you want the lifestyle that comes with it. Lots of good things, but lots of bad too! Personally I'm looking to diversify this year to take the pressure off photography a bit!
you're most welcome! Great article and congrats on the rep- up :D. Yeah, it seems like wedding photography would be REALLY demanding and a bit stressful, each bride wants their perfect shots and captures!
Yep! Definitely couldn't do more than 30 a year anymore! I'm too old for that shiz!
Good photos, I am a photographer, it passes for my blog and sees my content, I hope that it should be of your taste :D greetings
Big Balls & Bullshit Baby!!!!
All the way!
Did I ever tell you about the time I sold a print for 2 billion dollars?
Nice work man, just another Wednesday right?
Well, normally mine only sell for a few hundred million, so it was an unusually good Wednesday, you know.
Ah man, you KNOW it's a bad day at the office when you are only in the 8 digits for sales.
Private islands don't pay for themselves.
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TrufflePig, an Artificial Intelligence Bot that helps minnows and content curators using Machine Learning. If you are curious how I select content, you can find an explanation here!Have a nice day and sincerely yours,
TrufflePigI always enjoy your posts, Chris! They make me want to get out there! Very inspiring! Now all I need is a camera and a few lesson from you and Verity! :D