Monster Techie Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 1,697
|  Re: Requesting information about photography.
I think it's great that she wants to do photography! i'm in school and work at a local studio and i hope to shed a little light on this from my perspective and observations of the market.
1. No, education is not needed, in fact, don't do it unless you want to spend years learning what you can on youtube. It's not like she's becoming a doctor or lawyer, and if she's a really driven person, it would get in the way and be a waste of time and money. Trust me, i'm in my 3rd year of my 2nd photography school, it's not worth it.
2. What career path? The career path she wants. What does she want to do? stock? product? event/wedding? fine art? Pictures of flowers and landscapes don't sell, and usually anyone who tries to pawn off pictures of flowers as fine art get laughed at. Photography is not a 9-5 job, I hope she enjoys long days, and periods of no work, and looking at computer screens, and is a geek about it too, because unless she wants to hire someone, professional level digital photography requires a good deal of expertise of the hardware and software, and how it works and does what it does.
3. She'll figure this out on the way, it's a given, and quite honestly, the easy part. Just make sure it says either, Nikon, Canon, Epson, Adobe, Phase One, or Eizo on it. Very little else is good enough for day-in-day-out use, flexibility, and consistency.
4. If you can think of it, there's a market for it. But use some common sense. Look at the demographics of your town/city. If it's a city like Seattle, unless she can get **** good and reliable, she'll never make big bucks doing weddings. There's already people for that. Nonetheless, the work doesn't just come to you, you have to get it yourself.
5. how much do you make? give or take, nothing-to-chump change. Again, you're only as good as your last job, so unless she's good and reliable, not a whole lot, especially someone who has no trade experience. Not to mention overhead. "can you shoot my wedding?" "sure!" "I don't have a lot of money though" "that's ok, i can do it for $200, i'll just drop off a CD" What a waste of time. Subtract $50-$75 for possible rentals, $35 for fuel, and if you spend 5 hours shooting, and 4 hours in post production, that leaves her working about 9 hours not including travel for rentals or to get to the location for about $11 an hour. That's pretty much minimum wage in some states!
6. It's extremely difficult unless you really put yourself in a specific niche eg. scientific industrial, aeriel.. The problem is that everyone and their mother has a D40/Rebel. And people associate good photographers with big cameras. So when someone totes an SLR people assume they're a good photographer. That's not the case. I can have a Formula 1 car, doesn't mean i'm a race car driver, just means i'm a bad driver with a formula 1 car. I've seen some people make REMARKABLE turn-arounds, but again, these are people who are extremely driven and have little life outside of it.
Realistically, the most important thing she needs is networking skills. If she can't meet new people on her own, if she's shy, if she doesn't want to actively search for new opportunities, if she doesn't like to take risks, than she's not going to get too much further than $200 weddings for friends and family.
I don't want to sound like a buzz-kill, but photography is one of the most saturated markets in the creative industry. It's about as bad as musicians and almost as bad as graphic designers. Photographers are a dime a dozen, it's not the 1990's where the better shooters were obvious. Since digital and the internet, everything has just become so much more accessible, it's easy to teach yourself how to make compelling images. Like what ComatoseClown said earlier, if she can maybe get a job assisting for someone (social networking can really help out here), than she can get a glimpse of what working as a photographer is really like. She might not like it. I know alot of people where when they started working, they lost the creative drive that got them there in the first place, and it's sad, and frankly uninspiring.
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