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That last paragraph is probably the most impressive part of all to me! 😁
Yeah, I was going to just list the broad strokes of the actual skill/work required, but actually paying the bills while doing it seriously is just too much to easily ignore. There are some genuine ways to do stuff like that as a job or freelance, but not enough to support too many people. I'm guessing a good number need to rely on event photography to pay for their equipment, and I can tell you that's sure as hell not for me. (Unless I could be on a football sideline. But being a wedding photographer would be a nightmare for me.)
All my photography friends feel the same way about weddings. I imagine after a few people blaming you for ruining their special day for whatever crazy reason is going to kill your passion for something.
I really should look into some of the regulars I share to see if they have public gigs. There's been a few photos I wouldn't mind getting prints of, and I'd gladly share a link for them if it gets them some funding. If they do sell the photos I'd also be curious as to where since they'd probably have good articles to share as well.
I'm not anywhere near that level anyways. It's definitely a straight hobby for me, that I started with the idea of having shots for photogrammetry and other types of image processing and went down kind of a rabbit hole of just enjoying chasing birds (and bees, and butterflies), for the sake of the mechanical challenge. Getting from seeing something with your eyes to a balanced, focused shot is genuinely hard on its own. It would be cool to play with some of those $5k (or $50k) lenses, but one $500 lens every few years is way more in line with my budget.
But I'm not a huge fan of just being at crowded events drowning in people (again, sports are an exception, because the focus is the game), so the stress of needing to get a lot of really good shots and capture unique, irreplicable moments on top of that would definitely not be fun. And being customer service on top of that, another job I'd hate?
You seem to know what you want and you enjoy doing it, so I'd call that successful.
Do you share any of your pics online?
Another "I want to, but...". The places to realistically do that are basically sites like instagram that I see as actively malicious. I'll get to the point of just hosting myself on my own hardware to make visible to people who care, but definitely not promoting or anything. I just have a bad habit of stacking up too many other things to develop simultaneously, then doing none of them to read a book or play video games or do one of the different outdoor things I want to do instead.
But if you're curious I can throw a couple here. (And this post won't load for me after because my app can't parse multiple images in a post lol.
It only put up one with a pair of butterflies. I like it though. All the appendages stand out nicely and you see some details of the eyes. The one flying is also nice and clear looking.
I live near some water, and it would be cool to catch some of the dragonflies like this to get a nice look at them.
Edit: Now I see you broke them out. And you even had a dragonfly! I like that and that fuzzy little bee face too. I've been trying to post better attention to all the unique bee types we have as well.
I made it a chain of replies with one per post instead so my whole app doesn't crash every time I open it. One of the others actually is a dragonfly. Huge pain in the ass because of how fast they move, and because they're too small for my autofocus (that's also probably too slow). But really satisfying when you get a clean one (though I definitely had to massage that one in post).
I found ~f/10 with as fast a shutter as you can get away with is your best bet to get a clear shot with a decent chunk in focus. More open than that and the plane in focus is just too narrow for me to get anything.
I did see, I went back and corrected my post once I saw the others.
Nature photography seems to present a lot of challenges as you pointed out earlier. You only can carry so much equipment and you have a subject with no interest in cooperating that can move at any moment. It makes it all the more impressive, even to get less than ideal shots.
There's also a lot less owls, that are a lot harder to find than dragonflies.
I have shots I like, but they're pretty much all reasonably common animals because that's what I have access to, mostly in my back yard. Or flowers I mostly grew, or whatever. Getting an owl, especially doing cool stuff like that, adds the whole element of actually finding the right spot where they live and play, etc. It's a whole additional layer of work involved.
There. Splitting them into posts doesn't crash I guess.