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Well if your self employed you get paid what ever you can pay yourself and you get some freedoms but also all the responsability and you have to deal with all your money matters accounting and such. If you are a photographers assistant you get paid well and they probably wouldnt need you every day of the week. You'd need to be a really capable and helpful person.

If you work at like a pixie photos type place you are pretty restricted to taking stock standard portraits and dealing with children.

Getting into it is pretty hard. Build up a good portfolio while you're still in school :D

Being a successful professional photographer is one of the hardest careers to achieve. Monetary compensation can be anywhere between retail rates to hundreds of thousands a year depending on thet ype of photographer you want to be.

Wedding Photographers (the most common type of pro-photographer) can make between 1500 and 6000 per gig, depending on the client). Kep in mind though that because of competition, many only get a max of 5 gigs per year. So to offset that, a lot of them have secondary jobs.

Professional photographers working for magazines and what not make between 30 and 60 k a year in their early career with... let's say Conde Nast for now.

Most photographers have their own businesses and take pictures of weddings and special events. They make $300-$800 per event. The ones that work for news channels make considerably more.

Some info. I also read recently that a commercial photographer is a high stress job in general, and doesn't pay all that well relative to the amount of stress.

http://www.junshien.com/?p=1231

being your own boss will usually make the most money if you know how to do it.

if you can get a good job you can make money.

if not, you will starve.

most artists starve.