to not want to be a proper, professional photographer?

[Stinklebell]

I've always loved photography and over the years have done quite a few courses and I get some not bad-ish shots these days

It's really only a hobby, I've done a few weddings and some portraits as favours for friends and family, some product pictures for a friend's website and stuff like that. I enjoy it, it's fun, if I get a couple of hours to myself I love to go off over the fields and fart arse about with my camera.

I've been getting quite a bit of pressure lately, mainly from DH, but from other friends and family too, to start doing it professionally. I suppose I should take it as a compliment that they think I'm good enough, but I just don't want to do it.

DH thinks I'm mad, that my job could be something that I really love, and all the equipment that I've got could be earning it's keep

Whereas I feel that it's something I enjoy, it's fun, no stress or pressure, I can fiddle around to my heart's content so I don't want it to become my 'job'. I already have a job, photography is my fun thing, not a job thing. I don't want the pressure of turning out something good.

Is that just silly?

And also, I'm not that convinced I'm good enough to be honest

No silly at all. There are many things I enjoy doing that I wouldn't want to do professionally, it would take the joy out of it, feeling that you had to do it.

For example, I love browsing aibu when I get a minute. Would I want to be a mod? No way!

Not silly at all. It's an incredibly competitive field and if your heart isn't in it (professionally), you won't make it. Carry on enjoying it. Is there a more general issue that your dh wants you to be earning (more), or that he envies you your time?

No, it's one reason I do all my photography for fun is I'd hate to have to do the normal expected wedding shots, whereas mine are the ones that get put into the frames and they were taken with love. If it was work I'd hate it. Plus I can experiment.

no its fine, I enjoy baking and cooking and sometimes make birthday cakes for people but i do not want a cafe or worse a restaurant and I do not want a cupcake/ sandwich or whatever business from home because then it would no longer be relaxing and in my case dentistry pays much better than cooking

a hobby which turns into a job is right for some people but not others whether you are good enough or not is really irrelevant if you do not want to, I suppose then only scenario when DH etc would have a point is if you are on the breadline and it would pay much more than minimum wage job

YANBU it's not an easy job, you spend more time scrabbling for jobs than you do actually taking photos, plus it's hard to make something creative into a job without losing part of what you love about it. Clients often want very different things to what you do, so it can be hard to have to abandon your own standards of work.

jkklpu. No, there's no issues with DH and money or anything like that, he'd just like to see me do something I love I think.

My lovely mil is terrible for this. If anyone has a hobby at all she starts going on about doing it as a job ( even if they already have one).
I enjoy making cakes and every time I take her one I should " start a business" she also buys people expensive hobby presents if they express an interest in anything. Bil mentioned something about stars once and find his next birthday he got a really expensive telescope. Very generous but he's not really that into it.
I think with hobbies if you have to try and make money from it it can take the fun away - not always I know but for me hobbies are hobbies and work is work.

Other people have suggested this to me. However I have worked in a related industry and know its so competitive and relatively little money in it as a result.

The problem is more and more people going into the industry simply because they have a half decent camera and can take a few good photos. Everyone is now an 'expert'. Trouble its a world of difference between being able to do that and do it professionally.

And at the same time more and more people are doing it themselves as the technology is more readily available.

Unless you are truly exceptional, then I really wouldn't advise you to go into it.

murder that's pretty much how I feel regarding the creativeness.

I personally don't like formal portraits and things like that, it wouldn't be fun anymore if I had to do stuff I didn't like.

I prefer more informal, unguarded stuff. I took some pretty good pictures of my girls playing in a buttercup field in the summer. I stuck the zoom lens on, retreated to a distance so they didn't realise I was taking pictures of them and clicked away. I love those pictures and watching them play and mess about on a gorgeous sunny day was bliss. That's what I enjoy about it

I'd hate to be in a studio taking formal shots day after day, that's not fun

I have sold some bits and pieces to stock sites in the past and recently a few landscape pictures through a local art gallery owned by a friend, but I'd never earn a living without taking the business part of it more seriously, which is when it stops being fun

If i's not a financial thing then why do something you really don't fancy? Tell your DH to pull his beak out!

On a related but irrelevant point, four of my Facebook friends are photographers with their own businesses. Only one studied photography at university. Of the four, one is excellent, one is pretty good and the other two including the uni one are, er, not.

If you aren't keen on studio work then it's even harder, especially in the UK! Relying on having good enough weather for taking photos is a nightmare, there seems to be less demand for location shots too, when DH was doing photography most of the inquiries were people asking for studio shots.

Yanbu.

My degree is in photography and k worked as a photographer in my 20s, it is a fantastically fun job but extremely hard work and if you photograph the general public you need to be willing to work weekends and evenings.

I get encouraged harassed by my family regarding working as a photographer again but now I have a dc I would never consider it, for me it is now a fun hobby. I'm retraining in a completely different field.

I just quit doing it last year, after doing it part time for a few years. I was a family/newborn photographer. Around half my sessions were outside (obviously not the newborns!) and the other half were indoor mobile studio ones. My photos were of a very high standard, especially with the post-processing which I spent a good year or so working very hard on perfecting with Photoshop etc. I also spent a good six months shooting friends for free to practice before I felt comfortable charging at the higher end of the market as that was the level of work I wanted to do, and I didn't want to cheapen my brand by starting off lower down. However I know some people do just dive straight in - it depends what sector of the market you're ultimately aiming for.

On the one hand it was nice to have something outside of being a SAHM that brought in a tiny bit of spending money and respect from friends. I had spent loads on gear as it was, so it seemed sensible to make some money from it.

On the other hand..

• Trying to get photos edited within a reasonable timeframe when the children don't go to bed and when they do you're exhausted anyway kills the love pretty fast

• Sorting out all the boring things like liability insurance, upgrading the insurance on your car, getting legal proper licensed versions of all your software. Realising that you need to spend another few thousand on gear (although you don't notice it as being that much at the time as you only buy one thing at a time) to get the shots you really need to be competitive e.g. in low light, nicer depth of field, faster focus, image stabilisation etc.

• Doing your year-end accounts and discovering that you've made a loss because of the outgoings on gear and aforementioned software, insurance etc.

• Being bullied down on price by chancer customers - as a sole trader it is a lot harder to say "no" than when you are an employee and have a nice company rulebook to fall back on. Usually it goes along the lines of "But Uncle Bob does it cheaper". Yeah, there's a reason for that given the hours I put in and the extra skill I've worked on, but you're not listening any more, are you?

• Having people take advantage of your generosity and expect more and more (this is admittedly more an issue with my personality, but still!)

• Having people take weeks to decide what to order, and then expect the photos yesterday. Or worse, disappear entirely despite allegedly loving the photos and I KNOW there was nothing wrong with them!

• Most people never say thank you once you've sent off the CD etc - as it is a financial transaction and they've spent loads, nobody ever seems very grateful. Yet they call you for repeat business and when you go round all your photos are on display so clearly they liked them!

• Small children whose parents let them run around and into your equipment despite your best polite efforts to stop them.. you can't yell at customers' children! Or worse, the customers that yell at their children to behave when they're not doing anything wrong, and you end up with a whole bunch of sullen looking kids. I had a whole session like that once with a dad who loved to yell - amazingly they bought the lot!!

• Lugging all your heavy gear round to customers' houses, and finding they only have tiny boxrooms available with no natural light and no space to set up studio lighting easily, so you end up spending many extra hours in post-processing adding extra background and fixing bad lighting

• Friends of course want you to do their photos, but of course you can't charge friends full price. So you end up with loads of work for very little. And it feels really weird to charge friends anything at all and awkward too

• People want to buy gift vouchers for family/friends, you make the mistake of letting them, then the family/friends complain that they can only get four photos or whatever with the small voucher that was bought for them, refuse to pay more and blame you for this

• Spending ages replying to email enquiries (sadly most are not just "what's your price?" as that was on my website) only to have them say "Oh, we're going to PixiPhoto intead" or more commonly, no reply at all

• Weirdly I always had enough work, I never had to really push it, if anything there were times when I was overworked and that was very stressful indeed - another negative.

• Being a perfectionist. Whilst I'd let things slide for my own photos, I'd always imagine the customer on my shoulder, spotting some tiny little mistake somewhere. So I'd spend hours and hours in post processing fixing stuff most people would probably never spot or care about but I was paranoid about. And would feel guilty for charging if I knew I could have done better.

• The usual "style"/"creativity" issues where somebody wants something awful. To be honest this ended up being the least of my concerns although I was sometimes a bit at some of the more vanity-related requests. I did them of course, but sometimes you do feel some people want to present a particularly unrealistic fiction to family and friends, shall we say.. nothing wrong with a bit of nip and tuck, but these were extreme!

• The crap bit where you burn a CD, test it your end, post it off and the customer claims it doesn't work. And other similar technical crap.

• The crap bit where you order something from a supplier and because you are so exhausted as you were up until 2am, you make a mistake with the order and fixing it costs you the entire profits for the order.

• Then your website stops working due to hackers/an update breaks some plug-in or other/no known cause. Or your computer breaks, or your printer, and all your excuses sound so lame to the customer.

• If you give your phone number, getting phone calls at any time of day or night. I soon stopped this, but people still wanted me to ring them. With all three DC screaming in the background. Very professional.

• Customers saying that it must be easy because I have a "nice" camera, so it's no wonder the photos are so good. Yeah, I reckon Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler have really nice guitars too.

• Not enjoying taking photos of my own DC any more and not feeling bothered to edit them. Since I stopped doing it professionally I have gone back to my previous levels of photos and we have tons more candids than we did when I was working and it's much more fun!

Anyway, there's more, but I think you get the idea

The day I said enough was enough and called it a day, it was like a massive weight was lifted off me. Instead of a "new enquiry" filling me with joy, I'd just feel sick. I recently did "just one more" for a former customer, partly wondering if all I needed was just a break. However even though this particular customer is a nice person, it was so filled with stress I knew, for certain, I'd made the right decision to quit.

A whole bunch of us (mostly Americans) started in business around the same time, 2009/2010ish - must have been about 50 of us. Of those, I think maybe 4 or 5 are still doing it, and only one or two on any sort of serious basis, the others are very part time. Everybody who quit says pretty much similar things to what I've posted above.

Show this to your DH!!

I should clarify, I'm British and in the UK - it's just my photographer friends were Americans!

I would kill for a photographer to take pictures of my DCs in the woods or a field. My crappy bridge camera doesn't cut it and I'm not too sure how to use it.
All the photographers want to do staged studio crap which makes my DCs look clean, calm and tidy. Not the whirlwind children they actually are and that I want to capture.

YANBU to not want to do it but not everyone wants formal photography shots I'm in Northampton if you're free...

Night

I know a brill candid photographer, who did some amazing wedding photos dor a mate. not ONE pogroup shot in the lot of em? it was fantasric. I think she's based south of London but i know she will travel.

Pm me if interested.

Thanks all!

crispy you've kind of summed up exactly how I feel about it. It's a fun hobby for me, I don't want to add all that other stuff, then it stops being fun and just becomes a job.

I'm not a big fan of portrait photography anyway, I prefer hustley-bustley street photography, kids playing, landscape stuff, the textures on a tree stump, playing around with light and that sort of thing. More for my benefit than anything I could realistically sell. I did some touristy landscape stuff in the summer (local landmarks and that sort of thing) and I did sell some prints, but not enough to keep me in wine

Will definitely show it to DH

DH means well, I think he'd like to see me doing something I love, rather than something that is just OK. But I like OK, I work from home, it fits round the kids and it pays a pretty good wage and I'm cool with that

Night' I'm way down on the south coast so too far away

I feel the same way, OP. I get told a lot I should go pro and I did a couple of weddings and Bar Mitzvahs before I decided it wasn't for me. The reason my photos of my friends and family are good is because I love them and that reflects in the photo iygwim. Randomness other people and I'm just not that bothered.

The other thing that kind of pisses me off is that everyone's a photographer nowadays. They think that if you buy a DSLR and they think that's it. There's a mum at the school who has started advertising and she has openly admitted to me she only uses her camera in Auto. It's farcical!

YANBU, i often find myself explaining why it's just my hobby. I love photography and I love having that creative outlet. It's mine. I can be selfish and take photos of whatever I want and have my own time and space to go out and do so. I'm lucky enough to have won a few competitions and the prize money has allowed me to upgrade a couple of time and invest in a few lenses and some other kit.

Of course it's a huge compliment when someone suggests I could earn a living from it, but the thought of taking photos of other people's kid manically grinning against a white background bores the piss out of me. I've done some family location shoots and a couple of album covers for friends, a couple of weddings. They were fun, but the reason they were fun is because they were for people I love who knew the style of photography I like and were happy to just let me do my thing whilst they did there's.

But mainly the reason I don't want to is because I don't want to be another prick who got a DSLR and suddenly decided I was a photographer.

I'm a photographer and was about to write some stuff but CrispyFB beat me to it and said it all. I would never encourage anyone to be a photographer these days unless they were the second coming of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Your husband, along with most other people, hold on to quite a romantic, outdated idea of what being a photographer is all about. It's actually quite a repetitive, lonely job which is increasingly oversubscribed yet undervalued.

Keep it as a hobby and keep the love for it. I so rarely pull my pro camera out for myself now. In fact I have an 8 day old daughter, my first child, I haven't taken a single 'proper' photo of her. Part of me is quitr relieved that I can have a break from the photography job and just be a mum for a bit. And as soon as I am able I'm retraining. I don't see much of a future in the photography industry tbh.

PML at Chirpchirp's 'another prick with a DSLR'. So true.

chirp, so true although I'm aware I'm sounding exactly the same

I've also noticed a lot of people acquiring a fancy schmancy camera and then setting themselves up as a photographer. A friend of mine got a DSLR last year and has recently been advertising photoshoots on our local FB selling pages. She's never been outside the auto settings on her camera either. A couple of weeks ago she asked me how I got the 'blurred backgrounds' on my photos so I started to explain and she just glazed over so I put the camera on the portrait setting for her and she's been using that.

I sound like a wanky photo snob, but, for me, the bit that I enjoy is fiddling around and making my camera do stuff outside the normal settings. I once spent hours and several packets of sparklers and ended up with 2 pissed off kids whose enthusiasm for waving sparklers around had been completely exhausted until I got the hang of light painting, my DH thought I'd gone round the twist when I spent an hour at a busy local roundabout in the dark getting light trails. But that's the fun part for me, I turn out a lot of guff but getting that 1 perfect shot out of a hundred shit ones is what I enjoy and am enthusiastic about. Turning out white background portrait after white background portrait doesn't interest me in the slightest and I know that that'll be the bread and butter work.

After years of using a standard digital, have now bought a DSLR and have been reunited with depth of field. Am enjoying playing with the camera with the DCs. I think I'm pretty good at framing and using the camera, but it's very personal and if I was ever thinking of doing photography professionally (which I wasn't), crispy has put paid to that - hope you're enjoying photography now on a personal level, and hope you stick to your guns, OP.

It felt good to vent about it, hehe!

Seriously though - I wasn't so much a portrait photographer as a "lifestyle" photographer - I was all about children in natural poses playing etc. Very rarely (newborns aside) did I do fixed group shots, especially when I dumped the mobile studio for anything other than newborns. Most shoots I did were outside, in local parks. And even then it sucked and you'd think it would be fun as it's the sort of shots I would do for pleasure. Goodness help me if I'd been a white background/barefoot/inane grins kind of photographer!

However, I will say there was one benefit that I will take with me that I forgot to mention. Knowing I was going to go pro (and yes, I did not want to be a over-inflated-opinion-of-myself 'Mom with a dSLR' on auto like so many) I really put the hours into properly learning both photography and editing. Not that every customer appreciated that or could tell the difference! I won't lose those skills.

So now I'm finally refinding the love for photography again, I do take really lovely photos of my own children that I am proud of both as a mum and as a photographer (hobby!!) I don't know if I would have been motivated to work so hard had I not felt a responsibility to my future customers to really earn the money they had chosen to pay me if you see what I mean! Plus being forced to do sessions in "interesting" conditions as the timeslot was booked really strengthened my skills as a photographer too - I mean, with my own children I'd just wait for better weather and have more say over the timing! So I may be several grand down (finally sold most of the rest of the pro gear just before Christmas) but I'll always have beautiful photos of the DC and maybe their DC one day

And it has taught me never to be self-employed as a proper income again, ha ha!! My dad was, my FIL is, they all said it's bloody stupid, and especially if you don't have the personality for it like I don't. And they're right!

Loving my micro 4/3 Olympus OM-D E-M5 that I now use and keep in my handbag day to day, rather than lugging my massive D700 and huge pro lenses around too. Customers would never have taken me seriously with my "little" camera I have now but it takes shots that are 95% as good and frankly have better image stabilisation - it's only low light and not quite as good depth of field due to sensor size (but it's still fab) where I'm losing out. More than made up for by "pocketability"!