{"id":61579,"date":"2022-05-22T06:20:39","date_gmt":"2022-05-22T06:20:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/?p=61579"},"modified":"2022-05-22T06:20:39","modified_gmt":"2022-05-22T06:20:39","slug":"how-to-make-a-living-doing-portrait-photography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/blog\/how-to-make-a-living-doing-portrait-photography\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Make a Living Doing Portrait Photography"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/VJJ5NDJOtTA?autoplay=1&#038;mute=1\"><\/iframe>To find out how the pros do it, we asked professional portrait photographers to give us the top five tips they wished they had known when they started out.<\/p>\n<p>The answers are as varied as the photographers themselves and as inspirational as their work. We hope you find these tips helpful and take them to heart. Photography is an art, but it&#8217;s also a business, so be sure to check out our Beginner&#8217;s Guide to Pricing Your Portrait Photography Services as well! Enjoy!<\/p>\n<p>5 Top Tips for Professional Portrait Photographers<\/p>\n<p>The reason there are so few portrait photographers is that it&#8217;s hard to make a living at it. It&#8217;s not just the technical challenges, though they are formidable; it&#8217;s also the fact that our culture doesn&#8217;t value portraiture.<\/p>\n<p>Taken together, these obstacles make starting a business in this field particularly daunting. But if you love portraits, you might be willing to take the risk. And if you do, let me tell you, you&#8217;ll be one of a small and elite group that includes some of my heroes: Arnold Newman, Yousuf Karsh and Philippe Halsman.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve learned from many of my talented colleagues who shoot portraits and have been fortunate enough to see in person many of the great masters of portraiture; and I&#8217;m not nearly as good as most of them. But I have been doing this for 35 years, which is long enough for me to have developed a lot of practical wisdom about what does and doesn&#8217;t work when it comes to running a successful portrait photography business. And here is what I&#8217;ve discovered:<\/p>\n<p>To succeed as a professional portrait photographer requires a combination of four things:<\/p>\n<p>Your photographs are your business card, and the way you portray yourself is the first step in building a successful career as a portrait photographer. If you want to be taken seriously, make sure your images are professional and well lit. You don&#8217;t have to spend thousands of dollars setting up a studio, but your home photographer should look like they do.<\/p>\n<p>Treat every shoot like it&#8217;s a paying gig. It&#8217;s not only the right thing to do, it will help you gain experience. You should never assume that someone wants their photo taken. Your clients need to know they&#8217;re going to get their money&#8217;s worth no matter what you charge them. Show up on time, follow through with any commitments you make, and always deliver the images you promised.*<\/p>\n<p>There is no one way to do things when it comes to learning about portrait photography; just keep practicing and trying new techniques until something clicks for you. There are lots of resources online that can help you learn more about lighting, posing, and other practical aspects of this style of photography . Just remember to keep it simple at first; don&#8217;t stress yourself out over everything being perfect from day one! The more time you spend practicing and working on your craft, the better your portraits will become.*<\/p>\n<p>What is portrait photography? It is a special kind of photography that includes pictures of people, and it is intended to be used as a way of recognizing or celebrating the person. We may use these pictures to remember our friends and family members, but the main reason portraits exist is to show how the person looks like.<\/p>\n<p>Taken simply as a type of photography, portrait photography can be divided into two categories: fine art and commercial. The line between these two is not clear though; it will depend on whether the photographer&#8217;s income comes from art or from commercial activities.<\/p>\n<p>The main characteristic of fine art portrait photography is that it considers the value of the work in terms of its artistic merit. This means that it focuses more on composition and style than on technique and technology. This doesn&#8217;t mean that technical quality is unimportant for a fine art portrait, but it comes second after other artistic qualities such as composition, lighting, color theory, subject matter, etc., which have more influence over its overall look. The most important feature of fine art portrait photography is the aesthetic value it offers to viewers.<\/p>\n<p>In contrast with fine art portrait photography, commercial portrait photography tends to focus more on how to make money out of its activity than on artistic aspects. Commercial photographers are more likely to<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know about you, but I&#8217;m always looking for ways to make money in my spare time. In my case, it&#8217;s photography. I love taking pictures and editing them.<\/p>\n<p>When I was a little kid, I remember saving up my allowance to buy a cheap point-and-shoot camera so that I could &#8220;make money&#8221; by taking pictures of people at school functions or other events. I thought it was going to be fun because I liked taking pictures, and I thought that people would like their pictures taken by a kid, and they&#8217;d pay me!<\/p>\n<p>But it wasn&#8217;t that easy. First of all, most families didn&#8217;t have digital cameras yet. Secondly, even if they did have digital cameras, most families didn&#8217;t know how to use them yet. Thirdly, the kind of portrait photography that interested me required more than just plugging in the camera and pointing it at the subject (although there is nothing wrong with doing that either). Fourthly, if someone did want their picture taken by a kid for whatever reason, it was probably going to be one of my classmates. And finally&#8230; well&#8230; let&#8217;s just say there were some other problems as well.<\/p>\n<p>I decided that in order to make money from the type of portrait photography that<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a rare artist who gets to make a living doing what they love. Even for those who do, the pace can be brutal. But it is possible, and if you&#8217;re willing to work hard and adapt to changing market conditions, it can be satisfying.<\/p>\n<p>Tristan Auerbacher is one of these rare artists. He has been working professionally as a photographer for more than 10 years, shooting primarily portraits in his hometown of Chicago. During that time he&#8217;s made a name for himself with his elegant, modern style, and his ability to capture real emotion and intimacy in his images.<\/p>\n<p>The past few years have been good to Tristan: he&#8217;s had a flurry of new clients and is enjoying the fruits of many years of hard work. He shares his experiences on the blog he started a year ago: (&#8230;)<\/p>\n<p>You have seen portraits of people with a look on their face that says, &#8220;I&#8217;m happy because I have my family here with me.&#8221; A close-up portrait of the eyes shows that they are not happy.<\/p>\n<p>The reason is that many people do not know how to smile from the heart. It&#8217;s not easy to smile with your whole heart, but it is something you can learn. It will take time and practice, just like learning anything else new. In this article I&#8217;m going to give you some tips on how to make this work for you.<\/p>\n<p>Let me start out by saying that there is an incredibly easy way to learn how to do this: hire someone who knows how to do this well! It&#8217;s amazing how hard it is for people to pay money and get what they want instead of wasting their time practicing the wrong things. If you think this process will take you more than a few hours, then it probably will. If you think it will take weeks or months, then it probably will. If you think that finding the perfect photographer will be enough, then it won&#8217;t be. Only through experience can someone truly learn what works and what doesn&#8217;t. So let a pro teach you! You&#8217;ll be so glad you did!<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/kuRUXigBxoM?autoplay=1&#038;mute=1\"><\/iframe><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/_Thzif8awds?autoplay=1&#038;mute=1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To find out how the pros do it, we asked professional portrait photographers to give us the top five tips they wished they had known when they started out. The answers are as varied as the photographers themselves and as inspirational as their work. We hope you find these tips helpful and take them to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":54612,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61579"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61579"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61580,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61579\/revisions\/61580"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}