Nobody can call themselves professionals unless they do this for a living - so we don't call ourselves professionals. If you earn money on it but not making it a living you can call yourself a semi-professional or a keen amateur. In the very sense of the title professional is implied that you have a steady income from that title.

What we meant to say by this is that someone can be an excellent photographer without being a professional as well as being a crappy photographer who is a professional. The title 'professional' does not refer to any quality of your work. Same goes for music, dancing, all kinds of art, etc.

So: The title 'professional' is not something that will suddenly make your work earn the 'fine-art' quality stamp, nor should it be a sledgehammer that you can use to knock someone on the head with on your own way up.

The professionals that are real artists at the same time as having a humble appreciation of being granted such admiration would use neither approach in describing themselves or others.

A great photographer can take great pictures regardless of the camera or lenses. The equipment is mere tools that will help her/him on her/his way but you cannot become an artist by having great gear. That goes for music too. The greatest violin ever built will not make a bad musician play well. It will probably make bad music sound better. The same goes for cameras. If you got professional camera equipment it will definitely make your pictures look better but if your composition is bad then it will still not be a good photograph. It is so easy to get consumed by technicalities and develop a culture of always wanting more and better but the prerequisite to that is to develop your own photographic skills and become a better photographer otherwise the instruments in your hands will work against you. That being said while it may be true that skills matter more than gear the curve will turn around once you acquired the skills to take good photos in a variety of situations and most importantly if you like doing it. Then from my experience gear matters a whole lot more than people care to think and is almost as important as skill ~ in some situations gear is even more important than skill. But the prerequisite is still to develop skills and then you will know what kind of gear you need. So here is my 2 cents. Knowing what gear you need for the photo you want to take is as big a part of photography as photography skills. I would say that it is intrinsically related to photography skills!

So to be fair 'on the way... we are' but we cannot say where it ends or takes a new turn. We just adjust the exposure accordingly. ;-)

My pictures are licensed under a Creative Commons Navngivelse-Ikke-kommerciel-Ingen bearbejdelser 2.5 Danmark License.