How to Become a Professional Photographer
Hello and welcome, fellow (aspiring) photographer! I’m glad you are in the right mindset because you want to make the leap forward from unpaid unknown hobbyist to
well-paid and respected pro photographer.
This Course is not for veterans in the game, nor forbeginners who shoot in Auto-Mode and have never heard of Lightroom. I expect you to know what ISO
is, own a decent camera, and have shot at least a couple thousand photographs in your lifetime. The next level You are here because you want to turn that expensive hobby into a flourishing business so that you can create a body of work that stands the test
of time.
You don’t want your photos to rot away on some hard drive. You want your art to be seen, bought, and appreciated. I’ve done the deep dive. I embraced the grind. I failed, stood up, tried again, failed again, tried again, and succeeded. It was a tough (but very
worthwhile) transformation from being an amateur (and just a silly tourist), to a professional culture and travel photographer (and world traveler). I went all-in on learning the craft and the business of photography. And now I want to share what I learnt with you so that you can speed up your process and journey!
More than just a bunch of simple tips
Great, now, enough about me. You get the idea. I’m here to share my best tips, my lessons learned, and wisdom earned. Now, let’s get straight to it!
We’re gonna start off lightly with some basic tips you might already know, or else you will love to know these tips. Then, we move on to some more insider tips that the pros use to get ahead, and we up the ante at the end with some powerful insights and tough wisdom.
Here we go
1. Watch 100+ videos to cement the basics
We’re starting off with some light tips that might be familiar to you already, but if you don’t already do or know this, it will be a huge improvement. My first tip is to really deepdive into understanding the basics of photography, like how a camera actually works, what different kinds of light there are, what jargon photographers use, the history of photography, and all sorts of fascinating details. Study it well, and you’ll already look at the world differently than before watching these 100+ videos. YouTube is a fantastic (free) source filled with excellent videos to get you informed about the essentials.
2. Shoot RAW, not JPEG
It’s such a basic tip for everybody who knows this, but if you’re still shooting in JPEG, it’s time to switch to RAW in your settings. A RAW photo file looks bland and dull, but that is on purpose because you can make your photos come to life in your editing software. A RAW file has many more options than just the JPEG. You can create atmospheric masterpieces if you edit your RAW files in, for example, Lightroom.
3. Get yourself Lightroom
I know, I know, it’s expensive. A yearly subscription hurts, but you wanted to go to the next level, right?! You have to invest some money upfront to get ahead, and one of the essentials to get to that pro level is editing software like Lightroom. If that’s not an option for your budget right now, no worries, I have found a perfect temporary loophole: get Lightroom on your smartphone! It’s completely free, and you can do lots of great edits in there. As soon as you can, get the Lightroom software on your laptop because this will truly make a huge difference in your move from amateur to pro.
4. The Camera DOESN’T matter / DOES matter
There is a discussion amongst photographers about whether the camera does or doesn’t matter. If you shoot artistic atmospheric film with a classic camera from the 90s, you can produce beautiful art, that’s for sure. But there is a huge BUT if you ask me. I bought a ‘$500 starter-model’ at first, then upgraded to a pretty cool $1300 Sony RX III, but when I finally got a real powerhouse (the $4000 Sony Alpha 7 Mark IV with the 24-70mm GMasterII), I was actually quite in shock at how good the camera was. And the photos were just absurd (in a good way!). Almost all the photos I took were exactly as I wanted them to be. The autofocus of this powerful machine will blow your mind. It is definitely worth the investment. I could have never shot the photos I’ve taken with that 90s film camera. I could have never sold these as epic high-quality razor-sharp prints on people’s wall, and as commercial licenses for inflight brochures and huge physical advertisements. If you want to shoot funky black-and-white with an oldschool 2000s camera in Tokyo, like the legendary Daidō Moriyama, you could for sure, and probably do well with selling photobooks and such, but not many will succeed with just a simple camera. In my opinion, the camera doesn’t and does matter. It depends on what you want to create. And I reason that you will generate lots more photographs that will sell in multiple ways if you get yourself a powerhouse.
5. Invest in one fantastic camera and lens, not 5 mediocre bodies and 10 mediocre lenses
Investing tens of thousands of dollars into a dozen cameras is an option. But if you want to turn this expensive hobby into a professional business that generates money instead of costing you money, you need to invest wisely from the beginning. It’s better to have one $2500 body and $1500 lens than 5 mediocre bodies and 10 mediocre lenses that cost you $10,000. That one powerhouse will produce way better shots than all (the more
affordable but mediocre) cheaper hardware will do. Get a powerful jack-of-all-trades setup that covers 90% of your desired subjects. For most photographers, that is the 24-70mm range You can always choose whatever body and lens you want to buy if you don’t agree with me on this point. This is just my experience, and I truly believe this is the next smart move for the amateur who wants to go to the next level.
6. Study the Greats
What is actually a good photograph? What makes it ‘good’? What makes one photo iconic and legendary, and the other boring and uneventful? To get an answer to those important questions, you should study the greats. The legends of the game; the end bosses of photography! Observe the iconic work of Steve McCurry (my favorite!), the timing of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the landscapes of Peter Lik, the body of work of Michael Yamashita, Annie Leibovitz’s celebrity portraits, Fan Ho’s monochrome classics, and the timeless cultural masterpieces of Jimmy Nelson. For every category of photography–from drone to wildlife, and from product to travel–there are many greats that have excelled in their respective niche. Find what your niches are, and study the greats! p.s. also; observe their websites, portfolios, revenue models, marketing and so on. Observe how they operate their business and pick the best elements to build your own winning formula.
7. Find your niche and become a master
Most beginners and amateurs have a tendency to shoot everything and share everything they shot. The wedding of a cousin, the drone shot of a recent sunset, the birds and wildlife of that trip to Africa, a portrait of some random lady that wanted a cheesy shoot, and your old film shots from your 2010 trip to Tokyo. It’s a mess! Potential clients and brands and even possible fans have no idea in what you exactly excel. You're a jack of all trades, and mediocre at all of them. You need to niche down and master one of these niches to become excellent at one of them. If you’ve studied the greats, you’ll see they all have niched down to for example street photography (Billy Dinh), landscape photography (Albert Dros), and culture photography (Jimmy Nelson). I have chosen culture and travel photography, with an emphasis on colorful epic photographs, which also means I say no to drones, macro, weddings, product, model, wildlife, and so on.
8. Watch 100+ videos about editing
Photographing is the most fun part of the whole adventure, but when you get home, it’s time to start uploading those RAW files into Lightroom and edit these potential winners. But, please, before you just randomly junk on those sliders and slap on some 5-dollar preset from some Insta influencer, study editing. It’s an art form in its own right! Watch 100+ videos on YouTube about editing to really get to know what each slider does, what color theory can do for you, how you can straighten your shots, and how masks can fine tune your photo into perfection. I’m now still learning all sorts of tricks, shortcuts, and slick moves that make me go back to my already edited photos to fine-tune them even more.
9. Edit.
Really, edit. Editing is, if you ask me, 50% of a photo. A RAW file is of course dull and bland by nature, and a JPEG already has some colors burnt into them, but you can truly make atmospheric masterpieces with your edits. A good photo can become a legendary one by tweaking the right sliders, removing the dust spots, and masking the right areas. A little highlighting of the twinkle in the eyes can make a portrait exactly right. Edit, edit, edit. Take as much time with editing as you do with photographing.
10. Keep the edits clean and realistic
If you’re into artistic shots, then forget what I said here. But if you’re editing a beautiful landscape in Iceland, or a portrait of a Balinese lady, you should try to keep the edit ‘clean and realistic’. By that, I mean the colors shouldn’t be out of whack, or the subjects too sharp, or that is just so over-edited that the whole scenery becomes unrealistic. People who look at your photographs should have the sense that they could also see what you saw at the moment when you pressed that shutter. Everybody knows that photos are being altered a bit, but it shouldn’t be obvious at all (just like makeup on a woman, it should be subtle, not clown-esque).
11. Is your horizon straight?!
This sounds silly, but I have to ask because I have made this mistake for my first couple thousand of photographs: are your horizons straight?! I discovered Lightroom a couple of years later, and I found out many of my photos weren’t even straight. There’s a great tool in Lightroom called Transform to correct your cross-eyed shots ;) And before we move to the next point; camera lenses are curved, and they also need some corrections…
12. Learn and master the compositions to compose winners
I’ve seen so many mediocre photos that just make me cringe. Many beginners and even amateurs with 10+ years of experience just don’t seem toknow about the compositional techniques that make photos excellent instead of okay. You have to understand the compositions to see them in real life with your upgraded photographer's eye. If you know what ‘filling the frame’, ‘leading lines’ ‘rules of thirds’ ‘fibonacci’, ‘framing’ , and ‘patterns and repetition’ mean, you can see them while you’re out photographing. Tip: Check out Pat Kay’s Visual Patterns on Youtube. That cool series helped me immensely with ‘seeing’ compositions better, and thus making my photos a whole lot better.
13. It’s just like any other business
Now that you are technically sound and know how to turn a photograph into a finetuned masterpiece, it’s time to build the business that makes sure that photo gets sold, turned into art or even wins awards. Sadly, photography is not only about going outside and photographing. The business of photography means that you are effectively 90% of the time busy with editing, marketing, building sites, editing, social media, emails, networking, editing, and so on, and probably some more editing. About 10% or even just 5% is spent on actually photographing. Realize quickly that you're setting up a business, and all businesses have the same traits in that you have to do boring, repetitive tasks like bookkeeping, emails, building sites, doing 1001 different marketing promotions, and fixing small problems on a daily basis. If you don’t like to run a business, please keep photography as a hobby. This reality check hurts, but it is what is needed to get to the next level.
14. Build a brand
If you’re a business, you’re also a brand. To become a household name for clients and customers, you need to build a brand around yourself, your products, and your business. You have to build an image surrounding your brand that makes sense. This might be awkward for us introverts at first, but it must be done to succeed. Get the right name, get the domain name(s) and @ social handles, build modern portfolio websites and webshops, have a strong logo, and so on. Think 360 degrees in building your brand and business. For example: I have a Dutch name that nobody outside of the Netherlands can pronounce, and all the domains and @ social handles were already taken, so I changed my artist name and chose a name that works internationally and also as a
brand. I choose Marcus Musashi, which is a mix of Marcus Aurelius (the wise Roman emperor who wrote Meditations) and Miyamoto Mushashi (the badass samurai who wrote the Book of Five Rings).
15. Use modern tools to skyrocket productivity
I’m surprised at how many people still don’t use modern-day tools to get ahead. Google and YouTube have been amazing libraries for knowledge for many years now, but have you asked ChatGPT about anything and everything? You should ask LLM AI’s everything! It has replaced Google Search for me. I ask ChatGPT like15 times a day and get way better results than I would have with ‘old-fashioned’ Googling. Also; for marketing purposes, try Canva. For video editing, try CapCut, for editing on the go, try Lightroom Mobile. Want to build a beautiful website and/or webshop quickly; try Squarespace and Shopify! The internet is filled with tools that act like shortcuts to success. Use them!
16. Skip stock photography
Big sigh, I invested like 6 weeks (+-200 hours) into getting like 3000+ photos on multiple stock photography platforms. It was such an error-filled, frustrating task to get done. The descriptions, the tags, the errors, and the 1001 details you need to check, pffffffff! I’m still fuming from the ears. But that wasn’t the bad part of this story. What immensely sucked was the amount of money I earned with it. In 3 months time of my photos being live on these stock sites, I sold like a meager $100… I removed all my photos and took my loss. This isn’t the way.
17. Build your own License Library
But I found something way more powerful: build your own License Library!
Brands and customers can license your photography for your own set price, which is way more profitable than getting like 1 dollar from the aforementioned stock photography platforms. I built my License Library with Pixieset, and set prices to $175, $300, and $2000 (for a standard license, extended license, and a full buyout). You just have to sell 1 license, and you already have earned more in many months on these overcrowded stock sites. The only crux is that you have to showcase your License Library to brands and such, so that’s where you come in with cold emails, social media posts, blogs, and so on. It’s all about getting eyes on your products.
18. Embrace the suck, embrace the grind
Everything takes longer than you plan it to. This is a universal truth that sadly haunts us all. Embrace it though. Expect it to take double the time you think it will. Expect that it will take you at least a year of hard work to get to a higher level. Expect not to get paid for a whole year. Expect to not get your emails and DMs answered. Expect it to suck at first, because in most cases it absolutely will. This is what hard feels like. This is it. Get comfortable with the long grind. It is needed to get to that next level. Your ego will be humbled…
19. SHARE SHARE SHARE
It’s not something that I actually want to do, but relentless self-promotion on a daily basis is needed to get eyes on you, your craft, your photos, and your revenue models. Sharing is Selling and Selling is Sharing Get that as a tattoo on your lower arm to remind you to do that day in, day out. Write the tweets, share the reels, start that Reddit topic, DM all the brands, send endless cold outreach emails, write those blogs, email the media with your photo series, pitch your photos to Photo Awards, and so on and so on. If you want to get to the pro level, your art and craft need to be seen. So don’t let your shots rot away on some hard drive. Your shots need to be seen, appreciated, and sold!
20. Slow and steady on social media
Nowadays, it’s gotten insanely hard to get any organic traffic and engagement on your social media accounts. Just by posting a (good) photo, you’ll be neglected by the algorithms. But there are ways to get there slowly. It’s embracing social media and algorithms and fulfilling on what works. On Instagram for example you should for sure make wallposts that are carousels with enticing descriptions, tagged accounts, and the right hashtags. You should also share Stories on a day-to-day basis about what you’re doing (behind-the-scenes, what you’re thinking off, what you are working on etc). And then you have Reels… Long story short; to get ahead on social media, you have to work for it. Like really grind on a daily basis. Embrace it… Tip: If you’re new on social media as a photographer, see Instagram at first like a digital business card. Make sure your business card is clean and enticing and that it’s very clear what you and your photography are about.
