Glamour Portrait Specialty: Before you go to work in any town, check with the local authorities to find out whether you need a license to do business. Usually no license will be required, or one can be had for a few dollars.
If you don't want to do baby pictures, which is the surest and easiest specialty, you might specialize on portraits. One photographer, working out of Los Angeles, has set up a complete glamour portrait business in a trailer, complete with movable spotlights for careful Lighting effects, and has been so successful that he often finds it profitable to stay in the same town for weeks at a time.
This talented and enterprising young man, however, saw an opportunity in children's pictures which was sufficiently attractive to lure him into that field in spite of his wonderful hold on the glamour portrait specialty in Hollywood. He worked out a system for shooting baby pictures with a consistently high percentage of good results, opened a chain of studios in the Los Angeles area, all of them under the name "Susan's" and all using the same system, then proceeded to advertise heavily in the newspapers and over the radio stations. Within a few years, the income from these studios put John Reed into the millionaire class.
Reed, of course, was a man of exceptional ability, as demonstrated by his previous success with glamour portraiture, but his experience shows how ability can be richly rewarded in the baby picture field. Even if you aren't as shrewd as John Reed, you can still make a good income from baby pictures if you go about it in anywhere near the right way.
There is a type of portrait photography, and one which makes a wonderful specialty for those who have the flair to practice it impressively, which requires no studio lights at all and, indeed, not even a studio. This specialty is the production of outdoor portraits or character studies.
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Photography
