Young wanting to start a career

here’s a good thread photographer michael kamber wrote on the subject of starting out. good luck.

http://www.lightstalkers.org/advice_for_young_photographers

How about starting with a week long or longer workshop with a photographer you deeply admire? The right workshop doesn’t have the effect of a “little course”, it could sustain your growth for sometime. I keep typing and stopping..your words “if its worth it to have to get a career” are keeping me from knowing what to say here..I think your first concern needs to be the development of your personal vision with or without classes. But you could always start interning instead of school, and you’ll probably be more in line for work than if you (only) went to school or self taught. But all this depends on what kind of work you are talking about.

I have been with a Photographer last week actually, all week. He worked for a newspaper and he helped me out, showed me a lot. It was amazing and i even got some of my pictures published in the newspaper. Now im really looking for something more… I love photography. LOVE it, and i know its my passion and i want a career in it. Im just having trouble where to go next….Photojournalism for newspapers requires a school… i dont no what to do! P.S from New Zealand but on an exchange in Denmark til August.

If you want to shoot for a paper, why not see if you can intern at the one near you till August?

“Im just having trouble where to go next….Photojournalism for newspapers requires a school…”

Shannon, the only thing that you HAVE to do next is to practice your skills in photography by shooting all day long.
If you are intended to work for a newspaper or a magazine you don’t really need to study in a photography school, you only need a strong and interesting portfolio.
Editors are looking after your body of work and your future potential, not for diplomas and school titles.

My personal advise will be to start thinking about a story you can develop journalistically and then photographically. Find something that looks significant from a sociological point of view and try to approach it first as a passionate journalist and then as a photographer.
The only money you should spend must be on airplane tickets traveling around to make your stories, and not in specialized photography courses.

The environment for new photojournalists has changed. I believe that there is not any chance to start building a successful career the way that Nachtway or Salgado did.
We are in the days of independent, long or short term stories. The more significant and artistically original is your story, the more are your chances to be noticed from editors and media owners and then to be known.

Single photos like those that you gain from a non-story based street photography, are totally useless today. Unless you are interested of participating in art-photography exhibitions, the story-hunting is the way to go if you are really intended to make a career out of it.

An internship at a local newspaper, as Erica noticed above, is also a good way to begin.

Forgive me being so absolute with my advises. If you need further explanations and ideas regarding my confidence about what I am writing, send me a p.m. and I will finalize my point of view for you.

J.J.

I’ll agree with Jonnek to an extent.
Many newspapers require a degree (any degree) to get a job there, mostly to satisfy HR.
With that said, newspaper jobs out there are very, very scarce and getting scarcer. The best photographers seem not to be so much in love with photography itself, but in its power to express and communicate other issues that they are passionate about, so make sure you have interest and passion in life and other aspects of it. Be curious.

You go to college to learn about life and yourself and things that interest you. You can do plenty of photography in school without studying it. There will be those who say you learn about life and yourself through getting out there into the real world quicker, and that’s also true … it’s just different sorts of learning.

As for getting a photography career some good advice I once heard was “Be undeniably good”
That and work like hell, what was it … you only start to get decent after you put in 10,000 hours of work for your craft?

Good luck, I’ve got the same goal as you.

i have been looking at middlesex university in london. what do you think???

I would question the point of attending a course in the UK. The number of courses has exploded in the last few years and the quantity of decent tutors can not possibly keep up.
I was going to comment on the ubiquitous nature of the work they produce, photographers exploring empty spaces, ‘my dead grandmothers lampshade’ tells the world so much, a series on personalised wheelie bins – just straight middle of the frame portraits of the bins – colour pictures of a subject standing arms by side in the middle of their living room, hmmmmm, environmental portrait. I checked the MU photography course site – lo and behold – a pair of curtains! Fantastic. Look up recent issues of the BJP Project assistance awards, half the pictures published should not have made it into the camera, let alone out. Enjoy the seduction and first love of photography, look at everything you can, shoot everything you can, you will soon start to hone your direction. If you are worried by a lack of technical knowledge why not think about a one year technical course combined with a short business and marketing course? Just be wary of being jelly moulded into some half rate tutors idea of a photographer.

I can say that if this is the sort of photography that you are really passionate about, New Zealand is not the most target-rich environment in which to hunt!

Not only is it generally a well-behaved, well-fed law- abiding country, the population is only 4 million and the national psyche in my experience (sorry to generalise) is biased against spending money on things like photography. Great if you are a landscape photographer, though.

I would strongly suggest doing whatever you can to find opportunities in exciting corners of the world before you get the mortgage, avocado bathroom suite and rugrats!

Other than that, shoot shoot shoot and remember that to get a great image, you have to be there!

Become older.

Become younger.
like a child who is seeing with his/her own eyes.
don’t become like these old fucks in here, boring, bored of everything, not knowing what to do. yeah become younger than 18. be like fourteen.

Jukka-being old doesn’t make you automatically boring and bored with everything. One day,(hopefully), you will become old yourself and then you will see what I mean.
For the record I’m 52 this year and just as curious about the world and as excited by photography as when I was a 14 yr old with my first camera,(a box brownie).
Perhaps it may be true that youth is wasted on the young, especially when they make sweeping generalisations about us oldies. What next-a diatribe against people with beards?

The beard is a must if you decide to pursue landscape photography. For that it should be big, bushy and unkempt.
Grizzled and stubbly is good for many other types of photographers, but be prepared to fill it out on a few weeks’ notice if you do the type of photography which will take you to places where being clean-shaven carries as much credibility as wearing a frilly pink dress.
Just kidding, of course—JR’s comment above made me smile.

As a photographer, be sure you have an absolute handle on the technical aspects of photography. You’ll need to be proficient, to the point where you can produce a well-exposed, well-composed and well-focused shot whenever you are called upon to produce one. Learn to prepare yourself and your gear. For me, it’s stepping off the train, I have a personal ritual of checking that the ISO on my camera is suitable. (checking that it’s not still on ISO 800 from the night before when I’ll be shooting in the daylight.) After that, I check that autofocus is set and that exposure compensation isn’t dialed two stops in the wrong direction and that my battery isn’t about to die. (That’s also when I pull a piece of gaffer tape from the sharpie pen I’ve wound it around and tape my 5D’s power switch on, because it’s in an easy position to get bumped to off, most likely at the worst possible time.)
Kind of a pre-flight check, but the thing is, I do this not even when I’m “shooting,” but all the time. I always have some sort of camera with me, so I give it a once over, generally as I leave the house and look at the light or step off the train. Doorways, I guess, are my trigger.

When I was teaching myself light, I used to carry an incident meter and meter everything, in much the same way. The thing is, you’ve got to have your camera ready at all times. You don’t want to lose a shot that you’re expected to take, because of something stupid like a full roll of film or a memory card you forgot to format.
Next, master the “straight shot” – a picture devoid of artistic tricks and arty overtones. Unless you have a quite unusual editor or a lot of personal clout, it’s better to not shoot your work pictures on a fisheye Holga using cross-processed expired film.
After that, when you’re comfortable taking a competent shot on ten seconds notice, start to think about how you can take a better shot. How can you add something that you see and no one else sees, something profound and inspired. Having studied music, this is something I think of as “virtuosity.”
While the world has hundreds of perfectly competent musical performers, to get to First Chair, you need virtuosity, a term that has it’s roots in the concept of being touched by God. This is the thing that tells you that the violin piece you’re hearing for the first time must be done by Jascha Heifetz, or that the photo you’re seeing for the first time could only have been done by Diane Arbus.
When you have that, it doesn’t matter what you shoot, because everything you choose to shoot will matter. This comes through being relentlessly demanding of yourself and editing your stuff with a cold, unbiased eye.
Of course, orchestras are filled with musicians who will never be first chair, musicians who are fine technicians and probably have comfortable, enjoyable lives, doing what they love to do and there are just as many photographers doing the same. Nothing wrong with that, but I wouldn’t recommend striving for that when you’re eighteen. Dream big.

Most of the world’s significant images were made by people with cameras not as advanced as whatever you probably carry and captured in less than a sixtieth of a second, often by people your age.
Go read about John Filo and his Kent State photo:
http://edition.cnn.com/COMMUNITY/transcripts/2000/5/4/filo/
Here’s a guy about your age, who reflexively shot something he found mildly interesting and not only won a Pulitzer, but helped bring the end of the Viet Nam war, without going more than a couple of hours from his home in a small Pennsylvania town.
(Plus, he did it with a Nikkormat, half a roll of Tri-X and probably a 50mm Nikkor lens, a setup that would probably cost you $50 today in decent shape used. I don’t like gear discussions, but I find something joyful about that.)

OK – I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent and ranted too much, but good luck to you. Wherever you wind up, you’ll want a solid body of work to open doors and show people that you can do what they need you to do. After that, keep looking for those three or five photos that will define your career and make you live forever.

Jim – that is great advice for many of us and thanks for it.

The ISO checking thing is a good habit – I got caught the other day by my D3 deciding it needed ISO1600 in bright sunlight. Doh!

Of course, Jukka was not speaking literally. As Shunryu Suzuki said, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything.”

Jim – thanks for this advices.Really helpful and I agree on most of it.Excluding one
,,When you have that, it doesn’t matter what you shoot, because everything you choose to shoot will matter." . I think that photojournalism is 80percent subject and the rest is photography. Thats why one important thing to learn for young photojournalist (as myself) is to find a good subject-project. And that’s the part I find the hardest. Mostly as in my country (Slovakia,EU) from the world point of view nothing interesting is happening and there is nobody to teach you how to find something other. Maybe it would be helpful to write more about this.

to-mas why strtech it ….to the world point of view…why not start at home with your point of view which should be interesting living in Slovakia.
You could start with your point of view on your shoes. Then take them walking and check out your neighborhood from your and your shoes point of view and then little by little expand your horizon.
Dont expect things to be more exciting on the other end of the world. If you do not find it exiting at home it will only be more boring on the other end.

It is true what Kristjan says, but then, sometimes travel helps you to see things in a new way. Maybe you shouldn’t take anybody’s advice— of course, that takes some courage.

I understand what you mean Kristjan. But I think it depends on personal goals as well. Look at this year’s winners of worldpressphoto. If I exclude contemporary conceptual things (witch I mostly don’t like and definitely it’s not my style) and sport, I don’t know about any topic which I could photograph in Slovakia, which could compete with topics with international impact as Chinas earthquake,war in Georgia, etc.. I know about topics, witch would interest me, but would not be interesting for wider audience and would not make an impact even in small Slovakia (excluding that it would be hard to find a medium to publish it in).

I am not a hobby photographer to be satisfied just by my own happiness. I just finished reading of great book ,,On being a photographer" by Bill Jay and David Hurn.Excluding other really interesting stuff, one thing has cought my attention.The start of David’s Hurn carrier.
Born in 1934,decided to be photographer in 1955,moved to London, where he met Michael veto who got him to Reflex agency.In 1956,as 22year old he hitch-hiked to Hungary to photograph Hungarian uprising.He met correspondent from LIFE and got assignment from them at spot.Pictures were published in Life,Picture post and Observer. That’s start of his carrier in brief.And this is the tricky part. Do you think he would get famous if he would stay in small town in England photographing his neighbourhood? Maybe yes, but it would take longer time. Topic matters. Just how to choose and approach the topic.