Advice for noob photographers

I had a blog called Advice for Noob Photographers where I kept telling peo­ple not to be­come pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­phers, but I don’t up­date it any­more. It was too de­press­ing. I’ll copy some ar­ti­cles over to this blog sometime.

For bet­ter ad­vice about be­com­ing a pro photo­grapher, head over to Ken Rockwell’s web­site. He re­cently wrote an ar­ti­cle ti­tled How to Afford Anything, which of course caught my at­ten­tion be­cause I can’t af­ford noth­ing (ex­cept right now be­cause I’m in China, where I can af­ford noo­dles). The ar­ti­cle is geared to­ward pho­tog­ra­phers, as is the rest of his site. After read­ing the ar­ti­cle, I felt a lot bet­ter about never buy­ing flow­ers for my woman.

I don’t agree with every­thing he writes but he is dead-​​on cor­rect about many things, like Nikon be­ing bet­ter than Canon. (I for­get what page but I’m sure he said that.) And every noob as­pir­ing to go pro should read his How to Go Pro ar­ti­cle. Ken Rockwell tells it like it is:

“The photo jobs and lo­ca­tions that pay the most are the most boring.”

“Because [pho­tog­ra­phy is] fun, peo­ple look­ing to hire pho­tog­ra­phers can al­ways find some­one to do it for less.”

“Of course the av­er­age debt level of the peo­ple who got jobs and went to Brooks was $74,000 each. That means you might break even in 40 years.”

“Photography skills are a very, very small part of the business.”

“God bless teach­ers, but if they could cut it in the com­pet­i­tive busi­ness world they prob­a­bly would be, in­stead of an­a­lyz­ing it in class for much, much less pay.”

Seriously I think the best way to make money in the pho­tog­ra­phy field is prob­a­bly to sell stuff to as­pir­ing pho­tog­ra­phers, like light mod­i­fiers ($40 piece of plas­tic), Photoshop ac­tions ($60 curves), work­shops ($2000 bull­shit), etc. Hmm…

Come back soon for new of­fer­ings from DKwan.com!