Forget classes and skill and gear and taking good photos, what you really want is to LOOK like a professional photographer, right? Good, because Kai Man Wong and the DigitalRev TV team are here to show you how to do just that.
The transition from being a "hobbyist" to being a "professional" photographer was slow and seemed to creep up on me. I've been professional now for 6 years (as in, it's been my only job), and you can find my work on my website. Here's the story of my journey.
This appears to be a big week for Yahoo! with their $1 billion Tumblr acquisition announcement followed by a number of changes to their Flickr service. Exciting stuff in the tech world. However, amid the Yahoo! hoopla, CEO Marissa Mayer managed to insult the entire professional photography community with her comments, being widely interpreted as “there’s no such thing as professional photographers” anymore.
...there's no such thing as Flickr Pro, because today, with cameras as pervasive as they are, there is no such thing really as professional photographers, when there's everything is professional photographers. Certainly there is varying levels of skills, but we didn't want to have a Flickr Pro anymore, we wanted everyone to have professional quality photos, space, and sharing." -- Marissa Mayer, Yahoo Event, May 2013
Woah, there, Yahoo cowgirl...let's hold on just a second!
Yesterday, Flickr announced new changes that included a free, ad-supported terabyte of storage for all Flickr users. When I heard the news, I believed that Flickr Pro account users would be given an opportunity to stay Pro going forward. I thought this because this, in fact, was my understanding of what was told to me by a Flickr Senior Manager in a briefing earlier in the morning before the announcement.
Unfortunately, I found out the hard way yesterday that this is not the case.
If you're a Flickr user, you can currently snag and open a Christmas present from the service a few days early. The photo sharing service -- which has been undergoing a renaissance as of late -- is currently handing out three free months of Pro membership. Simply log in to find a link to the present on your home page, or visit the Holiday Gift page directly.
Zack Arias is a professional photographer based in Atlanta who runs a popular personal blog with a sizable following. He's also runs the photography equivalent of Dear Abby.
Ever wonder what the average age of professional photographers is?
I have been taking pictures for almost twenty years now and so much has changed over those years. Back in the beginning gas used to cost $1.00, Bill Clinton was president, and I was picking up a camera for the first time. I started out in high school playing with my father’s Nikon FM2 and taking pictures for the school newspaper. Today, I work with a medium format digital back shooting national ad campaigns, magazine articles, and catalogs. Some aspects of how I photograph have stayed unchanged, but a great deal has changed considerably.
I try to stay involved as much as I can with students studying photography at different institutions in the area. Every year I go back to RIT and do a lecture on the business of photography and I feel it's important that I do so.
Recently I got an email from a young photographer asking me about the career of being a still life/food photographer.
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My buddy Kyle and I were traversing a mountain road near my home town of Tillamook, Oregon. I am intending to create a tour company that will comprise of local tours in and around the Tillamook County area. We have many beaches, mountains, rivers and bays here and I intend to show people. Without getting too off-track, we were heading up into the mountains on a gravel logging road to calculate mileage and timing for a tour. A road I'd been on regularly as I had worked for the state department of forestry for a number of years. Eventually we came to a freshly repaired washout, where a landslide had completely deleted the road in that particular drainage. The washout had created the most amazing view of the Tillamook valley, a reservoir lake and some mountains with intense directional light catching every crag. I was compelled to take a photo so I might use it on a future brochure.