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>>4504446
Or just cash in on tourism?

>>4504452
tourists don't have cameras?

>>4504446
In photography? Anyone big right now is through nepotism, simple as that.

>What are some other fields in photography that can make you rich and famous but you just hate doing it?
Commercial photography potentially, but you'll fucking hate it. I did it for a while and it zapped my enthusiasm and I didn't touch my own camera for almost a year after I quit.

>>4504458
>Commercial photography
How do I start in 2026?

>>4504453
What is your point? Everyone has a camera, soldiers, beggars, tourists.

>>4504461
You'll start at the bottom and the bottom in my mind is real estate photography. Talk to some real estate agents in your area and ask about who they hire, as they likely hire a small local company, then just talk to that company about getting a job. You will make shit pay and shit hours because you're basically a peon but it's a foot in the door.

>>4504446
Not famous, but you can be rich doing product photography since most online sellers don't focus on it.

>>4504446
all decent paying work is soul sucking if you want to make art

>>4504446
Get in contact with real estate companies.
Offer to do the first 5 houses for free just to make a portfolio; then you can see if they're willing to pay. If not then you have something to shop yourself out with.

>>4510297
This. But be warned, other real estate photographers can be really aggressive about their business and don't want anybody else muscling in. The rivalry is insane. I was with one local photography company and ended up with a clause in my contract that had me agree to not work in that industry again within a 100 mile radius for 2 years if I left.

photojournalism is really fun

>>4504864
>product photography
That's gonna be dead quite fast. Take a photo of a product with your iphone and ask chatgpt to make a nice product photo out of it with any theme or background you like. It's gonna end up better than what most product photographers can achive. And it's free and fast. And it's also one of the AI fields where you don't immediatelly can tell that it's AI.

>>4504586
Most real estate agents just use wide mode on their iphones now since the quality is fine for the resolutions posted on internet listings. Only the higher end real estate (multi million dollar homes) will be photographed by someone professional. Some of them even have a cheap DJI drone for the neighborhood aerials, and no they hardly ever have a commercial drone operating license and nobody cares.

>>4512185
Accurate. Real estate photographers are still around but shits changing rapidly, there's also some new AI app that will do the HDR look without bracketing now and agents are really picking it up. All real estate agents really need to do now is learn composition and AI will do the rest of the editing for them.

Let's keep digging into the subject of making money, talking about tactics.

I keep offering my services to friends and acquaintances. Over the last year, I've done a couple of product photography sessions here (including my own business), a few passport headshots there, I negotiated a contract with a local boutique to photograph all of their clothing in prep for a Shopify launch, and finally this thread has motivated me to take a crack at real estate photography.

At what point does one consider an LLC along with branding, website, etc? Maybe a simple portfolio website and a business card is enough for a side-hustle scale photography operation.

>>4512944
>this thread has motivated me to take a crack at real estate photography.
Anon, don't. It's literally a step down from everything you've been doing and will pay the least of anything else you've done. You would be going backwards since you're supposed to start in real estate photography.

>Maybe a simple portfolio website and a business card is enough for a side-hustle scale photography operation.
Agents only hire small companies that have a few employees and they usually have a monopoly on that 200 mile radius. There are just 3 real estate photography companies in my city and every real estate agent within 200 miles is served by just those three companies and their employees, they don't bother with anyone else and especially won't touch just an individual.

If you really want to do it, you'll need to be hired by one of those companies and you won't get to pick your hours or days, they tell you when and where to go and you just do it. None of them have central offices you go to so everyone is just based at home and drives from home to the property they're going to be working, which makes it easy to have employees across the whole state since they just choose whoever is closest to the property.

>>4512956
Interesting. Thanks for that perspective. I suppose even if it is regarded as a step down, I still need cash. It just seems like reliable, steady income. I'll reassess.

>>4513055
I'm not sure where you are, but in my neck of the woods the real estate market has been slowly tapering off for the past 2 years. Houses now sit unsold for months, and fewer people are moving because they don't want to get out of low rate mortgages from 5 years ago for today's higher mortgage rates.