On 2013-04-10 16:40, Randy Little wrote:
Russ I am sorry but I wouldn't call that professional level. It might be serious hobbiest level. I wouldn't consider that work for publication.
The terminology isn't used very consistently, so I hope nobody takes offense at previous things said or what I'm about to say :-).
It seems to me that frequently doing work for paying clients who aren't your relatives :-) is one useful meaning of "professional", particularly if it's a significant portion of your total income. (I've done some of that, but never enough for it to be a significant portion of my total income. I've claimed to be working semi-pro a few years.)
However, many photographers think of portrait mills and catalog photography production lines (not fancy product work for ads, but the bulk fast work for little catalog illustrations) as more like being an employee of some company rather than being a "professional photographer".
And, just to confuse matters, some amateurs, people not making any significant part of their income from photography, routinely do work to technical and aesthetic standards considerably beyond what most people in portrait mills and catalog photography production lines, at least, do. Probably beyond what many small-town general-market studio photographers mostly do (senior portraits and weddings and a little product work and some art and whatever).
And then wedding specialists and photojournalists bring in another issue -- they absolutely have to come back with usable images each time they go out on a job or their career might end right on the spot. Which is yet another different set of issues and worries, and can cause them to denigrate people who sit in a comfortable studio and can shoot the stationary product over and over again until they like the result :-).
So there's a wide range of views -- technical ability, artistic ability, speed, independent clients validating your work, consistency and reliability, probably other things -- on what's really important. And sometimes those get wound up in defining what constitutes "professional", too.
I think any reasonable definition of "professional" does have to include other people consistently paying you for your work. And that provides at least some objective outside validation that your work is useful (to somebody), and that when hired you actually produce some results. But anything beyond that is, I think, apt not to be agreed on broadly.
-- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
