This question was asked on DSLRexchange. The final post is by a member who is a professional photographer.
http://www.dslrexchange.com/forums/...p?p=829#post829
Brian, thats funny. I went to the link to see what was written and get another viewpoint, and find that it was me who wrote that reply
🙂 Here we are again, at the same question in another venue just some months later.
Things have also changed for me in the business since that post above. I just opened up a 2,000sq ft studio 9 days ago. I still have blisters from moving, setting up the equipment, painting the walls, cleaning the 288 window panes, mounting the backgrounds, prop pieces, etc.
Living a dream?? Yes and no. My dream was to give up the software engineering life, hours of sitting in bad lighting in front of a monitor, sitting in hours of boring corporate meetings. My dream was to find a way to work for myself, work in ever changing work environments, and find something that uses my artistic ability and gives me daily challenges.
Having done well in software engineering during the Internet phase, and being married to a wife at a high corporate level with a very nice salary, has given me the opportunity to take the risk associated with doing photography on a full time basis. Without those buffers, it would be a very hard road to travel. I'm lucky in that I didn't need to make a salary in the startup phase. I didn't have mouths to feed, nor a mortgage to pay. With my wifes salary more than adequate to handle the financial responsibilities at home, I was free to build and invest in the business to jump start it. Without that buffer, I think it would have been much much harder.
Yes, the business is very competitive. Even worse with the semi-pro and advanced amateurs running side line business. They tend to eat up the more mundane jobs that was used to pay the rent for the pros between the more glamorous jobs. So the pros have to fight harder for those higher end jobs, and there are more going after them with their other work reducing.
And its the semi-pro and advanced amateurs that have actually made the entry into the field harder, thus excluding them from the field they actually want to enter. With more and more semi-pros going after the mundane jobs, the rates have fallen to new lows. They don't have a studio overhead, liability insurance, taxes, etc, so they charge far less than a professional could. When (or if) they decide to turn pro, they find they can't because they can't afford the overhead based on the rates they need to charge to be competitive against the other advanced amateurs, and they don't have the experience, background, or portfolio to go after the higher paying jobs. The have created catch-22 for themselves professionally, but a nice niche market if they want to stay semi-pro.
For a professional to make it, they need to concentrate on marketing in areas that semi-pros can't, or don't. Things like product photography, corporate, annual reports, catalogs,for example. While I seem lots of semi-pros lining up to shoots major sporting events, portraits, etc, I see very few with the knowledge or background to do consistent on demand product work. An editor at a magazine will tell me that if I don't accept the $200 per day for editorial magazine work, there will be a line behind me that will shoot just for a credit line in the magazine, and he's right. So pros pass on the $200 a day rate since can't afford to take that work, and it becomes the domain of the semi-pros.
The only people I see lined up behind me in competition for a corporate product shot at $700+expenses per day are other professional photographers. They all have studios, overhead, insurance, etc, and are charging accordingly. Thus the rates stay high, but competitive. Yea, its still competitive with a lot of photographer going after the work, but there is plenty of work going around. And when you factor in the cost of overhead, salary, expenses, profit, and that only 30% or so of a photographers time is actually billable, even at $700 its not a great rate.
Weddings are another lucrative area. Many people in this market are semi-pros, as well as full time wedding professionals. Most of the amateurs stay away from this work because of the liability involved, plus the fact you will be booking jobs as far as a year or more in advance. Its just not an attractive market for amateurs looking for capital to fund their equipment purchases like portraits are. But the profits from doing one decent wedding a month all year long would go a very long way toward covering the studio expenses. I've contemplated getting back into weddings for that reason. It will fill the gap between corporate work, and in fact I enjoyed the creativity of doing weddings. But its been a long time! I've got to build a new portfolio to do that.
Can professional photography pay well? Yes. Very well in fact, and you don't even need to be famous. I know of more than one photographer making $250K+ in sales from stock photography alone. But they are not the norm. But a hard working pro can do quite well for themselves, especially in the commercial and advertising areas. Photojournalism and editorial fare less, but in some ways are far more interesting in the variety of jobs you do. That richness in life experience from that type of work can be worth far more to someone that cash would. So its a reasonable trade off for some.
My advise. Look at photography as a business. Examine all aspects of if to assess if you have the skills, and would enjoy the work. You will spend 70% of your time managing the business rather than taking images. You will be doing accounting, negotiating with clients, spending time on the phone tracking down a widget to use as a prop, securing location permits, attending various events for networking, cold calls to potential clients, writing terms and conditions, managing production budgets, etc. You will get jobs you love to do, and you will get jobs that you take because you need to pay the rent. Hopefully, they will be balanced well so that you will enjoy your work.
Whats funny is that the more time you spend actually taking images, the less money you make. Areas like photojournalism and editorial where you spend the most time shooting, are the lowest paid. The areas like advertising where you get paid the most, you spend more of your time in 'production mode', and far less time actually shooting. Much like a movie set, where you spend 3 hours setting up and tearing down, for 15 minutes of shooting time.
My dream job? Nah. My dream job would selling erasers for pencils. Set up the business to run itself, pay loyal employees, and take a penny for each one. Then travel around the world on the patent royalties and the income from the business. Since that isn't going to happen, I can't think of anything else I'd like to do more than shooting photography for a living!
Wow, just looked back to proof read this (which I'm not now,too long
🙂 ), and realized I rambled on, and on... and on...sorry. Hope you find it worth time reading.
