You love photography and want to photograph full time by launching a photography business. Maybe you are unemployed or wish to supplement your retirement income or simply wanting to earn money doing what you love.

For those with jobs you may not want to quit the day job until your business is launched and earning you an income and enough income allowing you can quit that day job. Maybe you are unemployed and if so you can get started right away but be careful if your financial resources are limited.

So how do you get started? I have compiled these ideas into the 12 most important steps I believe are crucial to finding success as a professional photographer in today’s markets.

I have photographed at companies that were in the aerospace business and always thought it would be great to photograph a rocket scientist, like someone in front of the space shuttle. There are plenty out there working for the defense industry, but I never quite landed that client.

So I decided to setup my own rocket scientist and photograph them in a style looking cold war and Eastern Europe. This is my wife with a lab coat on, wearing German WWII motorcycle goggles, holding a rechargeable battery with a 20′ long yellow extension cord duct taped to it. And a 5′ model rocket ‘enhanced’ in Photoshop.

Every once in a while a cool project or assignment comes along. That is what happened when a client of mine asked me to go photograph at one of the sites of The History Channel’s Ax Men TV Reality Show. How could I refuse?

I have photographed logging, the timber industry, and paper manufacturing for companies like Georgia-Pacific, Westwood Corporation, and International Paper, so I am familiar with working in the woods and safety issues.. While I always enjoy getting into the woods with anybody including these guys, the fact that this assignment was a TV reality show certainly raised the ‘coolness factor’.

My wife and I however, have a closer connection to the show than this assignment. My wife’s family; my mother in laws side in particular, are from Vernonia, Oregon, where this show began. In fact, one of the historic buildings in town is named after my wife’s grandfather. The first two seasons I think were exclusively filmed in Vernonia before the production company branched out across North America to film other crews.