Love photography? 5 CAREER options for you

If you love visuals, you can choose from an array of options to pursue your passion and make money.

With pictures and visual story telling becoming an essential aspect of our lives, photography is evolving as a creative career opportunity.

From humans to food, wildlife, nature, or products, the story behind everything needs to be told to the world in a visually and emotionally appealing way.

As professional photography is both an art and science, individuals who wish to pursue a career in it are expected to have attention to details, the ability to capture emotions, and patience to wait for the right moment, combined with the technical understanding of handling, operating, and using a camera.

With more industries aiming to reach out to the audience through appealing, expressive, and informative images, the requirement for professional photographers is skyrocketing.

Here are a few job roles that a career in photography holds for you:

1. Product photographer

Product photographers accurately capture a product for brochures, catalogues, and advertisements.

They demonstrate the product in a certain way which attracts customers to buy it, solves the customers' problem, promotes the product, and highlights the value, quality, and quantity of the product.

The aim is to showcase its packaging, look, and texture through certain angles that make the customers experience the product without even touching it.

Product photographers can work with online shopping sites or can choose specific brand stores that sell electronics, cosmetics, footwear, clothing, or dairy products to work with.

2. Photojournalist

Photojournalists capture real-life stories, incidents, and events for journalistic purposes.

They gather visual evidence to support their news stories which inform and educate the general public.

Unlike regular photographers, photojournalists focus on storytelling, credibility, facts, and reality more than the visual appeal of the image.

They work for news agencies or documentary makers and display utter courage while working in war zones, poor weather conditions, and other critical situations with an aim to highlight the happenings around the world.

Professional photojournalists can work as environmental, feature, or sports photojournalist for different news agencies.

3. Fashion photographer 

Fashion photographer shoots clothes, accessories, footwear, and other fashion products in dramatic lighting, locations, and themes, usually with renowned faces to advertise fashion designers and trends.

Fashion magazines, big fashion brands and labels, and fashion product sellers usually use fashion photography for promotional purposes.

An important element of fashion photography that differentiates it from product photography is the involvement of models or celebrities that attract and compel people to follow certain trends to look similar to their icons.

Fashion photographers can work as editorial, high fashion, catalogue, and street fashion photographers.

4. Food photographer 

Food photographers capture appetising shots of different food products and ingredients, raw or cooked, for advertisements, cookbooks, blogs, magazines, and packaging.

As part of this job, you have demonstrate food in a certain way which evokes the smell, temperature, texture, quantity, and taste of the food attracting customers to buy it.

Some food photographers also work as a food stylist where they set up the food, lighting, and elements needed to be used in the background before taking a picture.

Food photographers can work for different food websites, blogs, ebooks, recipe books, and in the food editorial, advertisements, and packaging industry.

5. Freelance photographers 

Freelance photographers work on a contractual basis with multiple organisations to pursue their passion for photography.

They do not stick with a certain kind of photography and generally capture everything they love. The job involves capturing images and marketing skills to the clients through portfolios.

This is a perfect career opportunity for those who do not align with fixed working hours for a single company, taking photos for a specific niche, and can survive without a fixed monthly income.

Family, weddings, pet, portrait, event, landscape, real estate, and corporate photography are some of the most lucrative options that freelancers could opt to work in.

How to learn photography online

Availability of high-resolution cameras in our latest mobile phones allows anyone to capture stunning pictures in automatic mode. However, professional photography demands multiple skills that can only be acquired through a well-structured training.

If you are aiming to pursue a career in photography needs to have in-depth knowledge of technical aspects such as camera handling, natural and artificial lighting, getting good focus, capturing movements, composition rules, angles, parts of the frame, using the camera in manual mode, and equipment management.

Soft skills such as patience and persistence, storytelling, empathy, good communication skills, attentiveness, and observational skills are also essential to be a great photographer.

Through an online training, you can equip yourself with basic skills.

Online photography training usually has lessons on various technical and non-technical aspects of photography. It builds your knowledge about various types of cameras, lenses, and gears needed for different genres of photography.

You will learn to take creative control of your DSLR camera and click pictures, play with light and focus by understanding metering and focusing techniques, composition and shooting techniques, and transform your images to meet your vision by understanding Post Processing.

While signing up for a programme, look for a module that includes placement training, hands-on exercises, expert support through an online forum, and a certificate to validate your learning.

Sarvesh Agrawal is founder and CEO of Internshala and Internshala Trainings, an e-learning platform to learn new-age skills. He can be contacted on ga@rediff-inc.com