Professional?

Professional?

Photography is one sphere in which the term professional is used with very mixed and variable meanings. Let’s have a look, and see if we can clarify it, or maybe decide to use the word with care.

If thinking about my own situation, and I spent a large part of my career with written reports as the major deliverable from my work. Internal audit reports need to be factual and ought to be persuasive – a standard that many fail. I put a lot of effort into making the reports on my work and the work of my subordinates shorter, more helpful, and a lot more readable than the norm. I even co-presented courses on plain English for internal auditors.

For the last four years, Ephotozine has paid me to write articles for the site, and since March 2020 I have written around 500 blogs for this website. Along with my internal audit experience, I wonder if that makes me a professional writer?

Certainly, when I started writing the blogs the idea that being able to produce copy on demand (so to speak) would be a test of my ability as a writer was firmly in view. In the same way, a GP photographer will cover weddings, product shots, portraits and landscapes in the course of a week. Not to mention the interiors for estate agents and a few pet shots. So I’ll suggest that one mark of professionalism is being able to get on and do it, whether or not it really interests you. Maybe the trick is to find a way to make it interesting.

For a lot of photographic competitions, a professional is defined as someone who earns more than a tenth of their income from photographs: if that’s the standard my work for Ephotozine doesn’t count because it’s a relatively small supplement to my pension.

Maybe it’s the approach? I had one super organised boss who only ever had stuff on his desk that he was using for the current task. He filtered the post by putting things that he would deal with personally into a stack on his filing tray (the distance from the top of the pile indicating its priority), writing someone else’s initials on it and a note saying what to do with it, or consigning it to the round grey file on the floor beside his desk. Following this line I’d obviously write a detailed plan for each article with a list of all the shots I needed to take to illustrate it. Well, that’s a fail.

One other thought. I remember reporting on a potentially difficult situation to a city treasurer 25 years ago, and my assessment was that I wouldn’t be panicking yet. The subsequent discussion was cordial, but included the words ‘John, I pay you not to panic.’ I took that to heart and I think that it may be the core of being a professional. You always have a plan A backed up by plan B, plans C, and even plan D. And that’s just for starters!