You Need Lessons!

I was a self-taught photographer….and it showed.

I started my career freelancing…a euphemism for being unemployed….back in the early 1970s. When I got my first full-time newspaper job I didn’t even know how or when to bounce a flash (a basic news photographer’s trick).

So when I retired after nearly 60 years of professional shooting for newspapers and national magazines I signed up for a bunch of lessons and workshops being taught by other pros often who were much better photographers than me.

I took classes in wedding photography, portrait photography, flash-on-camera and studio flash workshops, boudoir (with my wife’s permission), photo editing in Lightroom and Photoshop, HDR and a few more plus I was also teaching weekly classes and doing weekend workshops with hundreds of students in the audience for a national retailer.

On FaceBook I see a lot of really well-meaning new photographers desperate for some feedback asking thousands of random strangers for critical critiques of their work. These poor dears are then set upon by the mob of dubious qualifications at best with confusing, conflicting and often just dead wrong advice. Mostly these comments come down to how someone else would have shot your image had they been there with a camera in hand. Some of the comments can be down right ugly and totally uncalled for.

But newcomers often complain that they can’t afford the time or the cost to get better and so they start on a long frustrating and unhappy journey into a lifetime of bad photography.

So how do you get better? You take some lessons or workshops. But how do you afford these lessons? One of the ways is to sell some of your photography for real money.

In the US there is a great demand for a form of photography called “seniors” where youngsters graduating from high school have a photographer shoot some stylized portraits of themselves often dressed up or wearing their team jerseys.

This can be pretty simple photography and easy money. You’ll need a camera and really one lens and an off-camera flash (You can use any old flash on a flash extension cord and save your money for a wireless off-camera system later on when you’re famous).

You’ll need to be able to lightly edit your images in a photo editor (and you don’t need Lightroom or Photoshop to do most editing) and produce a file that you can get printed and framed at a print house.

With a little Internet searching you can figure out what to charge for your work and for goodness sake don’t under charge. Set your rate at the going rate and deliver on time and you’ll soon be making enough money to hire a coach or take a whole bunch of lessons.

Even if eventually you don’t go pro you’ll at the very least end up as a way better photographer than when you started.

You will have noticed I didn’t recommend shooting weddings. Wedding photography is an art form. Too many new photographers think they can handle the work involved but weddings are fast moving events under a wide variety of lighting situations (inside dark churches to outside in bright noon day sunlight to dancing under the stars) with often ultra-high expectations by brides, moms and the rest of the family. Also most new wedding photographers don’t charge enough to actually make any real money for all this work.

Best suggestion is work as a second photographer (yes for less money) with a shooting professional until you know what you’re doing. Then go take some lessons.