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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 and it can create some emotional anguish for those trying to make it in the field. Without the normal cues and markets of job growth (promotions, raises, steady paychecks, etc.), photography growth is something that has to happen inside your own mind.
To that end, embracing the mental shifts one must go through to become truly professional is every bit as important as being able to “make a shot,” as they say. Here are the big ones you’ll need to get your head around:
Mindset Shift 1: Unapologetically Photographer
The real test about your own mental state over your photography happens when someone asks you what you do. You’ve learned to qualify the response so that mentioning photography also happens with comments…
