Many professional photographers have maximized the full potential of the communication network and the great development of digital photography and media. Many took the chance of engaging photography as their profession because of the commercial value it pays.

Being a profitable medium, photography requires more of a natural talent than formal training. However, it is very important to learn the techniques and technical skills to enhance the talents that will help you become a competent professional photographer in many fields. Here are some options for you if you would like to specialize in photography.

1.    You may specialize in advertising where you can supply good photographs for catalogs, corporate and marketing promotional materials, and annual reports.

2.    You may see yourself in the bio-medical field. You can create a compilation and illustration of medical studies and scientific documentation of images.

3.    You can be a part of a digital imaging firm. You can work using all aspects of the latest digital imaging procedures and applications.

4.    You may set up your own photo studio and photo laboratory. You will learn the knowledge on how to manage equipment and services in commercial studios and schools in your local area. You can also produce films and print digital photographs.

5.    Involve yourself in the entertainment industry. This is where you will be assigned to on-set photography in any motion picture project.

6.    Run your own art gallery where you can exhibit works of other photographers. You may also host gallery exhibits and book expositions.

7.    You could profit more in specializing your talent in photojournalism. You may tackle human interest and behavior in newspapers and magazine features.

8.    You can do image archiving and editing. You can research and catalog photographs in school and city libraries. You can also be a photo editor in publishing images in websites.

9.    You can earn in portraiture where you will be given commissioned works and public engagements.

Photography is a profitable source of income if you are an expert of taking images. Many who are beginning to learn the techniques often learn from professional photographers. This will guide them to clarify their options on what to specialize on in the future.  

Jerry J. Jansen

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From the early cameras seen in western films we have moved on to manual cameras with film. This film or negative captured the image on a roll to be developed in a dark room to prevent over exposure. The manual cameras used a theory of setting up shots. You had to understand aperture, shutter speed, white balance, and metering to obtain the best picture possible. This meant you spent a lot of time setting up the shot and had to be a professional to catch wildlife in their natural habits.

Aperture is measured by F-stops, or the amount of light the lens will let in. Focusing and depth of field are also important when setting the aperture on your camera. You have to know what numbers will allow more light to enter the lens and the converse to avoid over exposure and blurriness.  Shutter speed is the amount of time a lens is open for the picture. You may have found in a darkened room without flash your camera takes a while to imprint the picture on the negative. This is because the light is dim and the shutter must correct for the lack of light. The lack of light induces a need to expose the film longer to obtain the picture where as more light will have the shutter moving at a faster speed.

From the manual cameras we moved into the automatic. The camera became lighter. The shutter speed and aperture was programmed into the camera by the settings. ISO became important. ISO is the film speed. Instead of taking minutes to set up a shot you just had to pick the correct setting and hold the button down to focus. Many cameras came as automatic with manual options for those who still liked to treat photography as an artistic vocation.

Digital cameras are the new era in photography.  Now we can see the picture we take without the use of film and negatives. We can send the pictures to all of our friends and use our home printers to create prints. Photography has moved from the concentration of taking the perfect shot with a skill born to a few to everyone taking pictures.

This is not to say photography and photographers will not remain. There is still the need for quality in taking professional grade photographs. Light sensitivity is still important when dealing with a digital camera and unless you spend a lot, you will find quality of photographs is still missing. Photograph techniques lay within the lighting provided whether natural or artificial for the subject. You might wonder how to create a photograph in a dark room like a museum to share with your friends and family. Knowing the past photography techniques will help you in attaining that perfect photograph with your digital camera. Photography may have originated with few people, but we can see the advancements their inventions have led us to now.

Jerry J. Jansen
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The online world is full of photographers waiting to be discovered.  Places like deviantart.com, eBay, and other online galleries exist for the convenience of finding new photographs for you home.  Simply by putting the words photography, photographs, or prints will not lead you to the more professional prints online.  When searching online you will need to use specific keywords. These keywords take you to picture of a specific nature.

If you are more interested in wildlife it is best to use those key words along with photography.  Another drawback to online searching is getting the product from a reputable source.  You want to make sure that your credit card information is safe, that the shipping will be affordable and appropriate.  How they ship the print is also important you want to make sure a shipping company will not damage it. The number one thing about shipping prints is they require some insurance to ensure your investment has protection against damage, potential lost and theft when delivered.

There are several tips you will want to follow when shopping online.  Perhaps the most important tip is remembering you are seeing the print scanned into the online store.  This means you are not in the gallery to check the print over and analyze it to the full extent.  You will want to be a little wary if the photographs are grainy or they appear to have flaws.  It is often best to shop online at art galleries with a reputation.  These companies generally have great reputations and offer different shipping methods and insurance.

In order to find appropriate sites you will want to understand page rank.  Google ranks the web pages in order to give you an idea of the pages with the information you want as well as letting you know the sites validity. The higher the page rank, the more traffic the website has seen. Big known websites might offer more pictures and quality picture from a reputable service or business.

It can be very difficult to find photography galleries online that will actually sell their prints.  It will take a little time and effort, but the results are most often worth it.  Just searching for keywords may net you photography techniques or schools rather than galleries to purchase from.  If you have a favorite artist or gallery chances are you can enter their name to find the prints you are looking for online.  If you are hoping for quality prints, but do not wish to pay for an artist’s name you may have to spend a few hours to find just the right photographs.

Online galleries are just another way technology has become convenient for all of us.  Finding photography online to purchase can be difficult if you are looking for an obscure artist or print topic.  You will need to search with specific keyword or topics to find prints.  If you are interested in Alaskan photographs of wildlife you should narrow your sure just by mentioning the state.  We all find photographs add to a homes décor.  Galleries are often the way most of us find photographs because we like to see the prints up close, however online is the new way for convenience.  So the next time you wish to change out your homes décor you might look online for ideas if not the product to satisfy you and your families needs.

Jerry J. Jansen
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Sometimes it’s good for us as photographers to go back to basics.  And, of course, if you are just getting started in the world of photography and want to learn “the ropes”, the basics are a natural start.  But you want the basics of what the professionals know about the craft of photography.

Anybody can take a picture.  I attended a wedding reception where the wedding party left a disposable digital camera on each table at the reception for guests to snap photos.  Before the evening was over, it was the children who were running around taking pictures of everything from the dirty dishes to their own underwear.  These were not photographers and while those pictures will no doubt get a few chuckles, these are not the kind of professional pictures people want for their long-term memories.

Obviously, the cornerstone of the basics of photography is the camera.  When you see a camera geek walking around with enough equipment on his neck to launch a space shuttle, you get the impression that cameras are phenomenally complex, more than mere mortals can grasp.  But look at the professionals and you see them working with portable, relatively easy to operate cameras.  That is because the basics of running a camera come down to aperture and shutter speed.

Now don’t get nervous about fancy terms.  Aperture is just a term for how wide your camera lens is open to let in light.  And shutter speed is just how long you let the light come in to affect the picture.  For getting a shot of a fast moving event, you want a wide aperture to let in a lot of light but a short shutter speed so you capture the event quickly and close the window so the picture is caught before more light hurts the quality.

Photography is really all about light.  You can and will get learn a lot about lenses and flash photography and other ways to turn the control over the lighting of a shot to you.  So add to your core skills of photography a willingness to never stop learning.  The better and more sophisticated you get in your ability to work with the equipment, the more you will learn and the more you will want to learn. 

You can get a greater control over these basic controls of the camera such as aperture and shutter speed by learning how to switch from automatic settings to manual settings.  The automatic settings of any camera are just there for the general public who are not interested in learning the basics.  So they give you some basic settings like landscape, portrait and sports settings.  By switching to manual, you can learn what settings work best in different situations.

And that takes us to the most important basic about becoming a great photographer and that is practice.  Take some time with your equipment and play with it.  Take it to situations and take photos with different aperture and shutter speed settings, in outdoor and indoor settings and different orientations to light.  Don’t get upset when some shots don’t work.  That’s part of the learning curve.

By learning by doing, you will build your confidence in your work and eventually become a great photographer.  But don’t get cocky, there is always more to learn.  And that is one of the fun things about photography, isn’t it?

Jerry J. Jansen
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Of course, art is a subjective thing.  Many people would look at a Jackson Pollack “splatter” artwork and determine most definitely that modern art is not art because it “doesn’t look like anything.”  And if you spend any time in the modern art world, you will definitely see something at some time along the way occupying space in a perfectly respectable art museum that, to you, could never be considered art.

So is it just a matter of opinion?  To some extent, yes.  But there is an art world and an industry behind it that depend on there being some standards upon which art is judged.  One such standard is the intent of the artist.  If you produce a photograph or an art work derived from a photograph that is intended to be viewed as art, then the viewer is obligated to try to see the artistic merit in it.  Whether the viewer sees that merit or not may depend on the viewer’s abilities, how good you are at getting your artistic message across or many other factors.

But just wanting something to be art doesn’t make it art does it?  As a layman in the art world, I sometimes go with the “I don’t know art but I know what I like” system of evaluating pieces I see.  Art, after all, has a tendency to touch us in another place that is above and beyond the image.  It is an emotional place, a place of reflection and understanding.  Maybe we would say it touches our “soul”.  For a work to be art, there should be a message, a feeling, a reason the artist made the work because he or she wanted to say something, even if how I interpret the statement is different than what the artist meant. 

So that might also be an evaluation of a photograph as to its artistic merit or not.  Now the primary objection to whether photography is art sometimes is that a photograph is often a realistic depiction of a moment taken with a machine and some would say that “anybody can take a picture.”  The implication is that the same mechanical skill it might take to paint a picture of sculpt a statue is not needed for photographic art.

It’s true that the mechanical skill that the guy at Wal-Mart might need to take baby pictures may be the same as a great photographic artist might need.  But the objection doesn’t hold up because the same human language is used to create great poetry as it takes yell out obscenities at a baseball game.  So it isn’t the skill that makes it art. 

Good evidence comes from the credit some great art experts have given to photographic exhibitions in the fine museums in the world.  The very fact that photography is considered art by those who know may be evidence enough.  So the conclusion must be that because the arguments against the artistic value of photographs are weak and people who know consider photography to be art, then we are safe in viewing what we do artistically too.  And that opens up that side of your soul to express yourself through the medium you love the most – photography.

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