I’ve always considered myself a photography hobbyist or enthusiast. I enjoy the process of taking photos, processing the RAW files, and sometimes playing around with HDR, panoramic stitching, masking, and/or converting my photos into home movies. Sometimes people compliment me on my photos by saying, “You’re a professional photographer!” While I appreciate such comments and recognize that they usually mean that my photos may appear to be of “professional” quality, I usually reply by stating that a professional photographer actually makes money from their photos, unlike me.
Every now and then, I post what I consider to be one of my better photos to a site called 500px. While Facebook, Instagram, and other social media sties feature plenty of photos, 500px tends to be used by enthusiasts and “professional” photographers, so the composition and image quality of the photos you’ll see there are significantly better. One feature of 500px is that users can sell their photos. Today I received an email notification that I made a sale!
While $1.73 is not a whole lot of money, I now satisfy a very loose definition of what a professional photographer is: I made money from my photography! And technically speaking, if you look back at my sales history, I became a professional photographer back in June 2014:
However, my first sale was a little unusual. I sent my parents a link to my gallery to share some of my favorite photos, and my mom actually bought one of them. I told her that I could have sent her a copy of the photo for free, but that wasn’t the point—she just wanted to show support. After all, that’s what moms do.
Today’s purchase by Getty Images, however, is completely legitimate. Clearly I need to use a stricter definition of “professional photographer”—it makes more sense to define it as someone who depends on earnings from their photography, in whole or at least in part, to make a living. By that definition, I am certainly not a professional photographer, but I still enjoy being a hobbyist.
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