While I'm all for people following their dreams, I will be honest I do get upset when I see posts saying along the lines "I just got a nice camera, how do I sell my pictures" when someone is obviously new to photography and they are taking on clients.

I do think the business side of photography has been cheapen, the public no longer realizes that it takes talent that to run a successful photography business. The uneducated public thinks that slapping your expensive camera on Auto and running some PS actions at full strenght is all it takes to be a Pro. I do feel bad for the photographer that has talent and has to deal with clients calling and asking why they don't charge $100 for a disk full of images, or why they don't give away the disk just like X,YZ Photography. But times have changed, and the public wants fast and cheap over quality. I shutter when I walk into friends homes and see some of the "Professioal" protrait work that they have paid for.

I'm not a professional, have no desire, need or drive to become one. I don't want to deal with clients, they take the fun right out of photography for me.

Pixalated
I feel I need to identify myself a bit so you will better understand my concerns. I am a has been photographer who shot film. I had a studio and shot weddings. I am now 85 and because I was involved in a wedding recently, took my PS Nikon and grabbed a few shots of the bride and groom and groomsmen at a time when others were not shooting. The shooters were
friends and family who had no concept of posing.
I would liked to have posted my shots, but groom would not give me permission.
I had some excellent training in wedding photography, charged more than the competion and for my day and did quite well.
I think the digital camera is a boon for folk who want pictures of family, kids in sports. That was not my point at all. Mine was about those who are selling their pictures in competition against people who are trying to make a living at
their trade are being undercut by the two two dollar shooters..
Regards,
Jon Boy

I can't say I disagree with you. My wife at times takes excellent crisp 14MP shots with her fully-automatic $139 Canon A2200 while I sometimes don't with my $1200 worth of dSLR equipment in the same situation. The difference is that she is a happy-go-lucky snap shooter who gets lucky with her shots from time to time and I work at composition and post-edit my work for cropping, lighting, color saturation, etc. I likely take a very good shot 10X more often than she does because of my experience and eye for creativity. She's a total amateur and I'm an advanced amateur with a little bit of pro work in the past, and she knows that and when it comes to something she really wants to document well, she insists that I do it instead of her.

When you want somebody to shoot an important event that will never happen again the same way, you want the best documentation of it possible. You want to end up with a lot of good shots in your hand to pick from and create a "storybook" of what happened by handpicking the best of the lot. A professional is likely to be the one to achieve that initial big pile of good shots for you, is most likely to have backup equipment in case of failure, is more likely to have a second shooter available, is more likely to make you comfortable that things are going well, and will guide participants through the photo staging. Uncle Joe with his dSLR from Target might have only shot 50 or 100 pictures of flowers and your Aunt Myrtle then 10 of the 100 might have come out well. Uncle Joe is free or almost free but he has no training in lighting, aperture, shutter speed, ISO or anything else so he is at the mercy of the camera's decision-making abilities. The professional is not, has shot thousands of photos and maybe even 10's of thousands, likely runs the cameras on manual or semi-auto to have better control, knows about lighting and indirect flash, etc. If the documentation of that event is very important, which one is likely to succeed for you?

You don't hire a veterinarian's assistant to do open heart surgery on you although he or she has assisted in open chest surgery on a Spaniel recently. You don't hire a high school kid to rebuild your car engine although he tunes his own. You don't hire your niece who took an art class in junior high to build an e-commerce website for you although she uses Facebook 100 times a day. You don't hire a Wendy's burger flipper to cater a business luncheon although both cook for a living. There are snapshooters who nervously hope they don't let you down with zero good shots, and there are true photographers who will create the best they can most of the time while relaxed and their hope at every event is to boost the amount of good shots they take from 75% to 85%.

When I got married 4 1/2 years ago, I had a friend take wedding photos for me who had owned and used a film SLR for years . I handed him my Panasonic FZ-30, set it fully-automatic, and told him to just go around the room and take a LOT of pictures of everything from a variety of angles so that I could have many, many shots to post-edit and compose via cropping. I was hoping for 150 shots at least and possibly 200. I even showed him how to change batteries and gave him two freshly charged spares although I knew it could do 200 shots on one battery. I trusted the camera to do an excellent job of exposing with auto fill flash like it always does. I trusted the image stabilization and flash sync to avoid handshake. I trusted the shooter to be able to compose with a zoom and let the auto-focus do it's thing.

He took 10 pictures total. In most of them, he closed the built in flash so it wouldn't interfere with the service or be intrusive to those he shot. So down went the shutter speed and image stabilization tried valiantly to save the day but it barely did. We got two shots of my wife and I standing on the platform beside each other at the end. One was somehow goofy and the other had my eyes closed. I had to try to cut my eyes out of one and put them in the other. It didn't quite work so I can't enlarge to 11X14 because it becomes obvious.

So my carefully laid plans of using a friend and rising above his amateur abilities with technology did NOT work because he found ways to override my plans and blow the whole thing. Then he thinks he did an excellent job.

So while it's true that the latest digital technology makes more people snap shooters than ever before, it doesn't make them experienced and creative good/excellent shooters. Nothing can do that except experience.

Pepper
If what happens as I anticipate is going to, those two dollar a print shooters
who are advertising are going to be reported to the IRS to be investigated as to whether they are reporting their incomes from photography or not.
Personally, I don't see this an an infringement on their work. Fair is fair because the studio owner is paying taxes.
This month I will be sending estimated tax funds for my retirement and SSI.
What do they but two things are sure- death and taxes!
Regards.