How Valuable is a Degree in Photography??

So i am currently in college and have not declared for a major. I want to eventually make a living from photography as it's something i love and feel like Im decent at. My question is am i better off majoring in photography or something else related to the field? For some reason i just feel like a degree in photography might not be worth much since it should ultimately be your Portfolio that employers look at. Plus photography isnt generally a career you just get hired into right out of college. If i understand correctly most people start off slow with a few assignments here and there before reaching a full time position.

Anyone have any thoughts on this??

Not very.

Get a degree in studio art or business or something else. Do photography on the side.

I didn't get a degree in photography and I was busy doing freelance jobs on the side. Go out and get gigs, don't sit in and count on the degree. There's nothing that you can't learn from the internet about photography that you can learn with a degree.

So, I recommend a degree in something else, to be totally honest. I majored in environmental science and minored in studio art- can you minor in photography?

And don't have any expections about making it a full time career. It takes years and years to get to that point.

I do plenty of photography work on the side, enough to keep me busy and interested in it. I'm not at the point where I depend on it to put food on the tabe - I would hate that.

Think about getting your undergrad degree in something else, art or business, something that you feel will help you sort out the aspects of your future career that they don't teach you in photo class, i.e. how to start a business.

Once that is said and done, you can always go on to get your masters in photo if you so desire.

Business education is a valuable resource no matter what business you end up in. Even if it's photography, the business part eats up more time and is equally, if not more important, than the photography part.

Very few are hired out of college and it depends what you want to get into. Photojournalism students are usually looked at first for paper jobs, but overall photography is something you can do on your own. I have three degrees (OK, about 2 weeks away from my 3rd) and none in photography just finishing to finish as a backup plan. With that said wish I could take some photography classes just to see how they teach things, try new things, etc., but not as a degree concentration.

I wouldn't be as successful or working in the field I'm working in if not for my B/A in photography. I learned more in a couple of months working for a successful photographer about how to run a successful photography business then all the marketing and business classes I had in college. If you're going to work for IBM then those are the classes but its night and day from running a photography business.

Take some business but get into an area that the masses can't get into. If you're going to shoot weddings and such then a degree might not be the answer but unless you get yourself into the very high end world with weddings every GWC is your competition.

Get into an area of commercial/advertising that is highly specialized and your education will not only be appreciated but a requirement.

I've been working full time since graduation in 1986 and supported my family and have had my own business now for 9 years. I was the staff photographer at a hospital for 10 years and the pre requisite was a B/A in photography, hands on experience with all formats, dark room experience, 5 years professional experience with references, a smoke'n portfolio and an extensive interview process.

Without the degree I would have never gotten in the door.

airfrogusmc wrote in post #9130442
...I learned more in a couple of months working for a successful photographer about how to run a successful photography business then all the marketing and business classes I had in college. ...

Without the degree I would have never gotten in the door.

I think that is very common in many fields. I graduated schools as a electrical/mechanical engineer and got a job right from school because of my degree. Within days I realized how ill prepared I was doing real engineering work but school gave me the foundation. In the first few months I learned more about the real world on engineering and what it took to get a job don than in the 4 years I was at school. But if it had not been for those 4 years, I would have been totally lost.

Thats why the real foundation needs to be in photography and having real hands on experience with different formats, photoshop, lighting ( a real understanding of quality of light and what type of light and which modifier to use in which situation) backgrounds and background materials, things like color theory, 2 and 3 dimensional design, and the real bonus being surrounded by other creative people everyday and all of those connections and friendships you make.

I find people with local photography degrees generally pretty useless for wedding photography. Most of them start with me with about 40% of their photos in focus, and of the ones that are perhaps 5% are useful. They understand some theory, but not enough. They're used to working in a studio where they have a day to take a photo, at a wedding sometimes you have three seconds. Many just don't have a clue, an enthusiastic, intelligent amateur usually takes better photos.

Having said that, a photography degree may open doors. Then again, it may not.

An education in business and marketing would be more useful. Given the way photography as a profession seems to be going i'd suggest you do a degree to aim for a "regular" career, otherwise if you consider photography your primary career you'll have a hard, hungry life.

tim wrote in post #9130629
I find people with local photography degrees generally pretty useless for wedding photography. Most of them start with me with about 40% of their photos in focus, and of the ones that are perhaps 5% are useful. They understand some theory, but not enough. They're used to working in a studio where they have a day to take a photo, at a wedding sometimes you have three seconds. Many just don't have a clue, an enthusiastic, intelligent amateur usually takes better photos.

Having said that, a photography degree may open doors. Then again, it may not.

An education in business and marketing would be more useful. Given the way photography as a profession seems to be going i'd suggest you do a degree to aim for a "regular" career, otherwise if you consider photography your primary career you'll have a hard, hungry life.

Yeah if you shoot weddings its not all that necessary though I shot weddings all through college for a high volume studio and went to work for one of this areas really high end guys a couple of years after I graduated.

I did his table top, large format, commercial stuff, portraits all of his custom color and B&W printing but there are far more areas of photography that one can get into besides weddings. But most with a degree would probably choose a different area to get into anyway, they usually do.

In fact in this day and time I am SO GLAD I am not shooting weddings. I like working with art directors, graphic designers, account managers and other visual professionals.

So much of photography is small business entreprenuers. I think a degree is a waste for this type of work for a few reasons:
1. There is no bar to entry that must be satisfied by a degree (such as would be the case for medicine, engineering, law etc etc).
2. Most small business photography does not need to be high art. It needs to be technically competent.


Being a really good artistic photographer is probably a good thing, but not a requirement. Being technically competent is not something you need to go to school for. The technical aspects of photography are really not very difficult to learn.

The artisitic aspect of photography is probably hard to learn (impossible for some), but thankfully one can churn out quality portraits and such with no real artistry.

I learned more in 4 years of school both technically and visually and grew more in both areas than the entire time both before or since. You are in it everyday all day if you're in the right program and you're encouraged to explore your creativity fully. Then theres the people you meet and the lifelong connections that you make. I can't tell you how valuable those things have been to me.

Working with other commercial/advertising professionals (most of whom will have art or business degrees) tends to make a degree important in those circumstances. I don't believe it would have to be in photography specifically, but if not photography in specific, then either in art in general or in business. But in that environment, having gone to a good photography school is often the first step to being networked into the business.

For a person who intends to run his own retail-level photography business, a degree in photography can be a waste of time and money. Even a degree in "business administration" can be a waste of time and money for a small businessman.

Most (not all, but most) "business administration" and marketing bachelor's degrees from universities are intended to create "corporate cogs," not small businesspeople, unless you find one specifically geared for it. You can find such programs more readily at community colleges than major universities.

Those community college programs are also often taught by small businesspeople in those same communities--getting to know them gets you networked--in this case, going to the local community college serves a similar purpose to the big-city commercial photographer going to a major photography school. As a small businessperson, what you have to know to run a retail photography business is the same as what your barber has to know. Small business marketing is a very different animal from corporate marketing.

Outside of product and archetectural photography (which can be extremely technical) and some other technical fields, it's a lot more important to learn about art in general than photographic technology in particular. Technology changes every year--the basic principles of form and color and how homo sapiens reacts to them have existed for thousands of years.

A friend of mine has two degrees in photography from one of the most preeminent schools in the field.

He says if he had it all to do over again, he'd get a business degree first. He thinks that would have gone a long way toward helping him avoid some very expensive mistakes he made along the way during his career and that while the school did a wonderful job teaching him how to take a great photo, it provided practically no business-related classes.

All I can tell you is what worked for ME. And I wouldn't be working in the field I'm now in without my degree in photography and I learned more about business in a couple of months working for a successful photographer than all the marketing and business classes I had in college.

Even an MBA isn't going to prepare you to run IBM or start your own business without spending some time in that business and learning how it works. You don't see an MBA getting the job as CEO right out of school why would you expect it to be any different in photography. I agree some business classes as electives can be useful but with all the GWCs now a THOROUGH knowledge of photography and a strong vision and style and finding a niche is going to be whats going to separate the truly successful photographers from the ones competing with the GWCs and the weekend warriors.