Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

It’s Friday so it’s Q&A Friday once again. These are questions sent in over the past week that we’ve chosen to answer here. Details about Q&A Friday’s are below after the question and answers.

Question: Since the market for photographers in South Africa is not that big, where in America do you think is the best place for a young photographer? Do you think New York is the best place to start or somewhere else? Or should I rather look towards Europe as a place to start a career in photography? These couple of questions are so important to me so please please try to reply if you can. Thank you very much for your help. - DL

Answer: That’s a very hard question to answer. I wouldn’t normally recommend someone starting their career in New York unless you plan on being an assistant for a couple years first. NY is not the kind of market the average person can just jump in and make a living right away. If you’re an insanely talented shooter whose work really, really stands out then you could pull it off.

The question also greatly depends on what kind of work you want to shoot. NY is big for advertising and fashion. But, as an example, if you were an outdoor lifestyle shooter, then it would be a terrible place to get started. Somewhere like the West Coast of the U.S. would be a great place to start a career like that.

Where you live greatly matters when you’re first starting out because at first you will only shoot in your metro area. Once you get to a certain point years down the road it matter less where you live because bigger clients don’t really care where you’re from as long as you can get where you need to be for the shoot.

Sorry but I don’t have any experience with how the European photography market is.

Question: I noticed you mentioned getting an alien bee for lighting…Would you recommend it and their triggers over say a “speedlight” and pocket wizards? I mainly shoot wedding/portrait work so would the “speedlight” be a better option for quick portability and moving it? Im looking at options for a good lighting setup but inexpensive..not cheap quality though? - JU

Answer: If you shoot weddings I highly recommend speedlights over strobes for two main reasons. The first is the issue of power. When you’re shooting a wedding or any other event, you can’t be running power cables all over the place. There are strobes that can run off of battery packs but they’re extremely heavy and cumbersome.

The other issue is that of metering. When using a speedlight the camera and flash talk to each other TTL (through the lens) metering. That means when you attach a flash to the camera the camera tells the flash exactly what power to fire at. This gives you a proper exposure most of the time.

With speedlights there is no way for the camera to tell the strobe how much power to use. Therefore you have to manually meter to get a proper exposure. This is pretty much a ridiculous idea when shooting events. You can always guess and maybe get it right, but then if you move into a darker room back up, etc, your exposure will be off again.

I recommend either Radio Poppers or the new Pocket Wizard Flex system to maintain TTL control while the flash is off the camera.

Question: I have always thought I wanted to be a graphic designer until I picked up a camera when I became a photographer in the US Navy. If I recall correctly you did graphic design as well? I remember the visual reserve days a little. Do you have any suggestions for someone who is passionate about making this transition from design to photography? - SJ

Answer: Being a graphic designer is a great precursor to becoming a photographer. Many of the principals are the same. If you want to make the transition to being a photographer I would ease into it. Keep doing your design and start shooting on the side.

When I was doing both I would use a lot of my photography in my design work. Any design project that i was doing, if it were at all possible, I would shoot what was needed myself. That kept me shooting a lot even when someone wasn’t paying me to do so.

Another thing I did was to leverage my existing design clients and turn a lot of them into clients for my photography business. This gave me instant clients when I went full-time with my photo career.

Also, make sure you learn all that you can about the artistic, technical and business sides of photography and the photo business. You don’t  want to be just a “guy with a camera.” You want to be a well-trained, well informed person who takes the job as a photographer seriously.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 10:38 am and is filed under Q&A Friday's. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.