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A year ago I jumped ship, off a well-tread path of commercial art, to do what I truly love — photography. It was not only scary, but anxiety-inducing. I sat in the deep riptide of existential madness for months, wondering if I could even do it, not to mention the worry of how to feed the children and pay the mortgage with one of the country’s most notoriously difficult and low-paying careers.
Still, with encouragement from family and friends and a steady request for my images, I stuck with it. Slowly, my mindset changed — from someone who was trying to be a professional to someone who felt professional. But the truth is, I should not have waited as long as I did to feel like a professional. In retrospect, I was a professional from the outset — it just took me a very long time to embrace it. I knew very well how to take photos and had been doing it for a long time, even within my previous career. It just felt like there must be some horribly long checklist of things I needed to do, buy and achieve before I could really call myself a pro.
We tend to mark our sense of professionalism in photography by this undefined set of detailed technical skills and milestones: first with our mastery of controls, then lights, then concepts, then the quality of jobs we’re getting. This deferred definition of professionalism only exists in the arts…
