How many members have a photography related occupation?

[Carlsen Highway]

I sell magazine articles on the side, mostly outdoors magazines, but also the occassional general feature sort of thing.
I dont make enough money at it to survive, so it's a hobby I enjoy and it pays for itself easily.
I cant sell articles without being able to provide pictures, but I really started out with photography in my teens wanting to sell pictures to the papers. I soon found I could sell pictures easier if I could write as well....

...training? You know, I would go and study art history. The relevant technical side of photography can be learnt in a very short time, but if you want to know about pictures, go and study the Masters...Delacroix, Rubens, Davide, Carravagio, Raphael....

 

[LADP]

Motion Picture cinematographer here.

 

[payasam]

I've made money from teaching, writing, editing and photography. I no longer teach.

 

[brainwood]

I made money early on in my career as a photographer both stills and cine working for my fathers company making sales films.I fairly quickly moved into editing and have spent the last 20 years as a Documentary film Editor for mainly British TV.
Playing with cameras is now very much a hobby.

Chris

 

[Roger Hicks]

Jumped in at the deep end at 16 as an amateur with 800 feet of outdated FP3 and a darkroom. Since: law degree (no intention of practising); secondary school teacher (a result of taking the first job that came along after university in order to be near my dying mother); articled clerk with a firm of accuntants after she died; back to teaching because I couldn't take the excitement of accountancy; interspersed this with working as an assistant in a London advertising studio; moved into audio-visual production; last job as an employee, technical brochure production (mainframe computers); freelance writer/photographer since 1982.

Usually I produce packages of words and pictures but sometimes I just do the words and sometimes I just do the pictures. I've done about 50 books, far from all on photography, and I earn most of my living from magazine articles, almost all on photography, plus my web-sites.

Most of the older people on the forum (certainly 50+, maybe 40+) will give you the same advice as Al: photography isn't that difficult to learn, and other subjects -- even law -- will probably teach you more about Life, the Universe and Everything. The main purpose of university, after all, is to keep the wolf from the door for a few years while you grow up, and to disguise the unemployment figures.

Be wary of the advice from the old guys, though. Increasingly I am told that employers demand (substantially worthless) pieces of paper as a passport to a job: a qualification, even though that does not necessaruly correspond at all closely to an education. If you can, try for both.

Cheers,

Roger

 

[parsec1]

Astrophysics and Cosmology at Cambridge and Princeton and then straight into press photography.
Would have been strangled if my father could have got his hands around my throat but he would had to have stood on a chair.

 

[OurManInTangier]

Been a pro since leaving Uni. Hard work , great fun and it is possible to make a very good living from it. I'd also agree with Roger about getting a certificate of some kind (i.e degree, masters or whatever) simply because far too many employers will simply sift out those without a degree whilst still at the application stage - I've seen it done plenty of times and you know some good photographers are being passed over. Here in the UK the various 'media' courses have proven very popular in the last fifteen years or so and as such you will need to be truly outstanding to get noticed without the same bit of paper as many others.

Of course you can always go your own route, knock on doors, assist other photographers, get an internship at a photo agency etc etc etc. There is no one path.

 

[squirrel$$$bandit]

Having spent a decade making a living exclusively off of my creative output (not photography), I have to say that I have mixed feelings about it. I miss not having to go to work, but I don't miss events like my son hitting his head on the coffee table and having to decide whether it's worth taking him to the emergency room or not, given the absurdly high deductible of my absurdly expensive private medical insurance. My life was freer then, but I was always anxious.

These days, I have great benefits and get a regular salary, and often must postpone indulging my creative impulses. But on balance, and given the ongoing recession/depression, I think I like it better this way.

 

[dazedgonebye]

I joined the Navy in 1980 with a guaranteed placement as a photographer.
They got me in to boot camp and changed my mind...ended up on a submarine.

I've likely made a better living off of the training I received, and the subsequent degree, but I often wished I'd not swerved off that road.

 

[Gumby]

Most of the older people on the forum (certainly 50+, maybe 40+) will give you the same advise...

Be wary of the advice from the old guys, though...

I once would resent words like this, but now that I am one of "the old guys" I don't feel so bad about it.

 

[35mmdelux]

The world of near-photographers is full of gear-wallahs and tinkerers (neither a bad thing) but if you focus on content and just pick a body, pick a lens, pick a film, and pick a developer, and stick with it, resisting the desire to shuttle back and forth from this system to that and D-76 to HC-110 to ...

Right On! Best advice ever.

 

[aizan]

we have photography books at the library. does that count?

 

[ernesto]

Have worked as photographer, doing wedings, advertising, and cientific photography, while I was at the university, but I am architect, and of couse I did architectural photography too.
I find photography a valuable tool for architects. Nowadays we can do CG images that are like photographs,

and rendering softwares works as real cameras. Finnally a good training as photographer not only helps to handle CG softwares but what is more important: is a great creative training that helps mentally visualize the architectural spaces and volumes during the desing process. Learning how we (as people) see spaces, and perceive their atrubutes is a must for an architect, and photography is a great tools, at least cheaper than building to find a spacial mistake!

E

 

[mcgrattan]

I'm not a photographer but I work for a library department [at a very old, very famous library] primarily concerned with photography [images of rare manuscripts, primarily]. I advise the photographic staff and am involved with the behind the scenes technical/development stuff. I have taken the occasional photograph and scanned the occasional glass-plate, too, but that's not my job.

 

[WoolenMammoth]

I work in the motion picture industry.

 

[jeff laitila]

I'm not a pro, but I do sell about $20K worth of images per year.

Not nearly enough to quit my day-job, but it does pay for my gear and vacations.

 

[Rick Waldroup]

I started out as a PJ over 30 years ago. I did that for several years and then changed paths and became an architectural photographer shooting commercial real estate. I did that for about 20 years. Then I went back to photojournalism for a few years. I just retired from that work in May of this year. I now sell some work through a stock agency and sell a few prints here and there.

 

[jody36]

Im a wanna be artist. I am in reality a retired fire fighter who is a nurse.

 

[tensai]

Vaguely related, I work as an illustrator and composition and visually communicating a concept or narrative etc. are similar elements of the job. I shoot a lot of reference for my work and have the occasional pure photography assignments, but luckily not that many. I really like photographing, but love drawing.

 

[Adam]

Does it count if...

Does it count if...

...the camera's in space? I'm a programmer on a team performing calibration of an Earth observation instrument.

That's a bit cheeky, so I answered 'no'.