Career in Photography

A background in computers also helps in gaining the technical expertise. Such skills are required to get just the right look of your pictures as per the client needs. This involves camera and lighting skills, digital imaging skills and knowledge of the technical intricacies of the equipment.

To get started, it's a good idea to get on-the-job training by working with an established photographer. This will help you gain business acumen, client handling skills and a good idea of the problems a photographer faces in the field and learn how to them. Photography workshops are great hands-on experience as well.

Showcasing your work in online albums, communities and forums is another great way to get started. Enhance your skills by getting direct feedback and tips from visitors to your album. You can complement this by doing some freelance work. It further builds up confidence to approach other photographers and organisations from where you can get full time work.

Subodh Chatterjee, who owns a studio, shares his experience on taking up photography as a career. "I started as a freelancer and used to get my portfolio published in some magazines. This is where I got noticed by some ad agencies and got some more freelancing work," he says. "This gave me the confidence to start my own studio." The most important thing in the beginning of your career is to 'showcase' your work and get noticed, he advises.

Technical operational skills, visual eye and a distinguishing portfolio of your work will be required to help you stand out. Use it as a marketing tool for your skill.

You can be self-employed and run your own studio or take up freelancing projects. You can also start as an assistant with a professional photographer or work with creative people like art directors, depending on your field of photography. You can also assist various news reporters.

Pay prospects
Initially, it's bit hard to make a living in this field but if you're extremely creative and prepared to put in the hard work along with getting equipped with good business skills, it could become a rewarding profession for you.

An assistant working with a senior photographer can earn between Rs 3,000 to Rs 6,500 per month. You can also take up some freelancing jobs and then later work as a full time professional which could fetch you anything from Rs 25,000 to 40,000 a month. Some fields such as fashion photography are even more lucrative if you're an expert in the field.

In case you're self-employed, you can earn from 10,000 to 50,000 a day depending on the kind of assignments you get. For example, you can make huge money if you are a wedding photographer and get a big assignment.

Your salary varies based on the place you're working in and the creativity you bring to your work along with your experience in the field.

The real picture
Initially the earnings may be less and you may have to settle for whatever assignments you get. However, perseverance is key.

It's fun to express your creativity with colors, shades and objects. However, a career in photography may require you to work under pressure and in difficult working conditions. It could be demanding and involve irregular working hours.

Career options A career in photography offers the following options:

~ Photojournalism
It's a part of journalism in which images are used to tell news stories. It requires promptness and instinct to generate ideas to make a news story from pictures. You can create a news story from pictures taken during a war or riots in the city/country. Photojournalists should be prepared to take risks like going to war zones, disaster zones etc.

This also covers feature photography like capturing pictures for an entire theme or subject and telling a news story. You can work independently or work for a news agency.

~ Fashion and advertising photography
If glamour attracts you, then this is for you. It involves working with models and is quite a lucrative and creative field. The work could be used for advertising agencies, fashion houses and fashion magazines.

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The ups and downs of freelancing

~ Nature and wildlife photography
If you're a nature freak and also have a passion to capture it, then go for it. You can work for travel and geographic magazines, calendars as you travel around capturing waterfalls, landscapes, wildlife and other interesting shades of nature.

~ Event photography
Event photographers work for weddings and other events like sports meets, family functions etc. This still has strong demand for film photography, since most clients would like a copy of the negatives.

~ Still photography
This involves the capturing of inanimate natural or man-made objects. Portrait photography is one example of this, where you can capture pictures of children, pets etc. You can run your own studio or work for someone. Capturing pictures for cookbooks is another good opportunity.

~ Travel photography
If you love adventure and travelling then travel photography could be good option for you. Travel photographers can work for the hospitality industry, travel magazines and websites. It requires being able to capture the right shot at the right moment.

Types of Photography

Types of Photography

"Casting Winds" - this black & white displays the classic monochrome look, as well as the use of simulated optical filtering (wratten #25) to enhance or diminish the rendering of certain light wavelengths.

1) Black-and-white photography

All photography was originally monochrome, most of these photographs were black-and-white. Even after color film was readily available, black-and-white photography continued to dominate for decades, due to its lower cost and its "classic" photographic look. It is important to note that some monochromatic pictures are not always pure blacks and whites, but also contain other hues depending on the process. The Cyanotype process produces an image of blue and white for example. The albumen process which was used more than 150 years ago had brown tones.

Many photographers continue to produce some monochrome images. Some full color digital images are processed using a variety of techniques to create black and whites, and some cameras have even been produced to exclusively shoot monochrome.

2) Color photography

Color photography was explored beginning in the mid 1800s. Early experiments in color could not fix the photograph and prevent the color from fading. The first permanent color photo was taken in 1861 by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell.
Early color photograph taken by Prokudin-Gorskii (1915)

The first color plate, Autochrome, invented by the French Lumière brothers, reached the market in 1907. It was based on a 'screen-plate' filter made of dyed dots of potato starch, and was the only color film on the market until German Agfa introduced the similar Agfacolor in 1932. In 1935, American Kodak introduced the first modern ('integrated tri-pack') color film, Kodachrome, based on three colored emulsions. This was followed in 1936 by Agfa's Agfacolor Neue. Unlike the Kodachrome tri-pack process, the color couplers in Agfacolor Neue were integral with the emulsion layers, which greatly simplified the film processing. Most modern color films.

Introduction

People were by far the most common photographic subject of the 19th century. Photographic portraits were much less expensive than painted ones, took less of the sitter’s time, and described individual faces with uncanny accuracy. So great was the sense of presence in these pictures that photographers were often called on to take portraits of the recently deceased, a genre now known as postmortem portraits. Miniature painters, who had previously supplied the least expensive form of portraiture, quickly went out of business or became daguerreotypists themselves.

Interest in daguerreotypes dwindled in Europe after 1851, when English photographer Frederick Scott Archer invented the collodion, or wet-plate process. Like Talbot’s calotype, this was a negative-to-positive process, but because the negatives were made of smooth glass rather than paper, the collodion process produced much sharper images. Glass was also more durable than paper, so it was easier to produce many paper prints from one glass negative.

Using the collodion method, French painter and photographer Adolphe Disdéri in 1854 invented the carte-de-visite, a form of photographic calling card, which soon became the new rage. Taken with a special camera that produced eight poses on one negative, the carte-de-visite—and its larger sibling, the cabinet card—created a market for celebrity photographs in France and England. Cartes, as they are known, were both traded and collected; they served to connect royalty with commoners, actors with their audiences, and old society with the newly prosperous.

In the United States, the carte-de-visite played second fiddle to ever-cheaper variations on the daguerreotype theme. The first of these, the ambrotype, was nothing more than a glass negative backed with black material, which enabled it to appear as a positive image. Patented in 1854, the ambrotype was made, packaged, and sold in portrait studios as the daguerreotype had been, but at a lower cost. Even less expensive was the tintype, patented two years later, which substituted an iron plate for glass. During the American Civil War (1861-1865) tintypes were the most readily available form of location portraiture. Tintype photographers often worked from the back of horse-drawn wagons, photographing pioneer families and Union soldiers.

History of Photography

Photography is the result of combining several technical discoveries. Long before the first photographs were made, Chinese philosopher Mo Ti described a pinhole camera in the 5th century B.C.E, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) (965–1040) studied the camera obscura and pinhole camera, Albertus Magnus (1193–1280) discovered silver nitrate, and Georges Fabricius (1516–1571) discovered silver chloride.[citation needed] Daniel Barbaro described a diaphragm in 1568.[citation needed] Wilhelm Homberg described how light darkened some chemicals (photochemical effect) in 1694.[citation needed] The fiction book Giphantie, by French author Tiphaigne de la Roche, described what can be interpreted as photography.[citation needed]

Photography as a usable process goes back to the 1820s with the development of chemical photography. The first permanent photograph was an image produced in 1825 by the French inventor Nicéphore Niépce. However, because his photographs took so long to expose, he sought to find a new process. Working in conjunction with Louis Daguerre, they experimented with silver compounds based on a Johann Heinrich Schultz discovery in 1724 that a silver and chalk mixture darkens when exposed to light. Niépce died in 1833, but Daguerre continued the work, eventually culminating with the development of the daguerreotype in 1837. Daguerre took the first ever photo of a person in 1839 when, while taking a daguerreotype of a Paris street, a pedestrian stopped for a shoe shine, long enough to be captured by the long exposure (several minutes). Eventually, France agreed to pay Daguerre a pension for his formula, in exchange for his promise to announce his discovery to the world as the gift of France, which he did in 1839.

Meanwhile, Hercules Florence had already created a very similar process in 1832, naming it Photographie, and William Fox Talbot had earlier discovered another means to fix a silver process image but had kept it secret. After reading about Daguerre's invention, Talbot refined his process so that portraits were made readily available to the masses. By 1840, Talbot had invented the calotype process, which creates negative images. John Herschel made many contributions to the new methods. He invented the cyanotype process, now familiar as the "blueprint". He was the first to use the terms "photography", "negative" and "positive". He discovered sodium thiosulphate solution to be a solvent of silver halides in 1819, and informed Talbot and Daguerre of his discovery in 1839 that it could be used to "fix" pictures and make them permanent. He made the first glass negative in late 1839.

In March 1851, Frederick Scott Archer published his findings in "The Chemist" on the wet plate collodion process. This became the most widely used process between 1852 and the late 1880s when the dry plate was introduced. There are three subsets to the Collodion process; the Ambrotype (positive image on glass), the Ferrotype or Tintype (positive image on metal) and the negative which was printed on Albumen or Salt paper.

Photography

Photography is the process of recording pictures by means of capturing light on a light-sensitive medium, such as a film or electronic sensor. Light patterns reflected or emitted from objects expose a sensitive silver halide based chemical or electronic medium during a timed exposure, usually through a photographic lens in a device known as a camera that also stores the resulting information chemically or electronically. Photography has many uses for both business and pleasure. It is often the basis of advertising and in fashion print. Photography can also be viewed as a commercial and artistic endeavor.

The word "photography" comes from the French photographie which is based on the Greek f?? (phos) "light" + ??af?? (graphis) "stylus", "paintbrush" or ??af? (graphê) "representation by means of lines" or "drawing", together meaning "drawing with light." Traditionally, the product of photography has been called a photograph, commonly shortened to photo.

Uses of Photography

Photography gained the interest of many scientists and artists from its inception. Scientists have used photography to record and study movements, such as Eadweard Muybridge's study of human and animal locomotion in 1887. Artists are equally interested by these aspects but also try to explore avenues other than the photo-mechanical representation of reality, such as the pictorialist movement. Military, police, and security forces use photography for surveillance, recognition and data storage. Photography is used to preserve memories of favorite times, to capture special moments, to tell stories, to send messages, and as a source of entertainment.

Commercial advertising relies heavily on photography and has contributed greatly to its development.