How much technical knowledge do you need to become a professional photographer? It varies.
I have a friend who is a great photographer but hates Photoshop and post-production. He shoots primarily public relations and corporate photography with a small bag of photo equipment. After an assignment he burns a disk of high-res jpegs and hands them to his client. The clients are perfectly happy with this. His greatest strength is the way he interacts with people, eliciting responses and capturing them. Keeping the technical aspects simple helps him concentrate fully on …

How does a photographer make the transition from enthusiastic amateur to professional? Well, it starts with the sale of that first photograph. Then, hopefully, there will be another sale, another assignment, another job to follow. And then one day you’ll stop and look back at years that have gone by. That’s pretty much my vantage point as I write this.
If I were starting all over today it would be in a very different photographic world than in the early ’80s. My teeth were cut on Tri-X and D76. If that …