Tomorrow I become a photographer

Annie sang it already and she was right: the sun will come out tomorrow. On the one hand, after the grey months there seem to be the odd (admittedly cool) sunny day again. Street photographers and landscape photographers are itching to go.

But on the other hand it stands for something else to me. We want to photograph, so why do we sometimes put it off? Because there will be more opportunity tomorrow? Think along with me.

Lately I hear more and more photographers around me, perhaps I attract them, thinking about where they want to go with their photography. They are not only professionals, but good amateurs too, who find a creative outlet in photography.

Often that happens alongside their job. Sometimes literally on the way to their job, when the mist hangs over the fields and a church tower seems to raise its finger out of it. Our subjects make a strong call on our cameras.

I want to do more with my photography

Certainly in the camera clubs, the photo walks and my street photography workshops, I often hear people sigh it. I want to do more with my photography. Later, when I retire. Later, when I have more time. Later, when it may well be too late.

Later is too slow a shutter speed. It blurs your photo and makes you lose focus entirely. Yes, I rolled into photography through burnout, but I have had to make considered decisions in that as well.

I hear of people going out to photograph one day a week. One day out of forty hours is ten per cent less salary. That is a lot. It can be the difference, certainly these days, between being able to buy a house or not. To name just one thing.

Yes, but I want to do more with my photography

Sometimes I wake at night with an idea. A new project, or a technical challenge for which I have suddenly found a way forward. There is something in photography that pulls all my thoughts (besides my family, happily) towards that one passion like a magnet.

I think of cities I want to go and photograph in, reflectors for my portrait photography, a workshop I really should finally take. An idea for a column. Perhaps I am obsessive to the point of mania. Perhaps it could be a notch less.

But I do know there is no room for another job. A stable job, working for a boss, my word, what a lot of puzzling that would save.

I sometimes wonder whether that would not make me happier. Give me more calm. And perhaps both, but it has become an impossibility. My manic obsession with photography means I can no longer be anything other than a photographer.

Happily it is not as bad as it sounds, but there is a kernel of truth in my argument above. I am actually quite level-headed about it. I would not want it otherwise.

Follow your passion, where you can

I also know photographers who want nothing more than to photograph, but who could fill a zoo with the obstacles they see. That is a difficult position.

Of course, a family perhaps, other responsibilities, maybe the security of an income mean you cannot simply burn your boats. I understand that, naturally. A career switch is no small thing.

Besides, I do not even want to push you in that direction. Everyone has their own reasons for staying in the safety of their current job. Over the past few years in the Netherlands, after enormous growth in freelancing during the pandemic, the number of sole traders has been falling, I read somewhere.

Most photographers fall into that group.

A passion does not have to become a job

And then there is the sword of Damocles: if you turn photography, your hobby, into your profession, the passion disappears and the fun fades.

I hear that often, and yet it too is only an assumption. Perhaps it is an excuse, a built-in safety. “I went and found a job after all, because I was losing the fun in photography.” Now it is a hobby again and the fun is back.

Perhaps this story is not about photography at all. Perhaps it is about life: we like to put off the things that frighten us, do we not?

Thinking out loud

The penny has already dropped for me and I no longer need to think out loud about it: I am a photographer. But for you it may well be useful, that thinking out loud. What happens when, in x years, you do have the time for photography? What does that mean then?

Will you then, after all those years of work, take pictures for your own album? Will you chase a second or third career with the safety of a pension behind you? Certainly an option.

The last thing I want is doom-mongering, but what if you do not reach that pension, or the date you set yourself, in good health or with the same passion for photography? What if you come to regret not having started sooner?

I regret not having started sooner. I started twenty years too late and feel a rush to catch up with the people I admire. A hopeless task, and completely unrealistic. But still.

What does photography mean to you?

The question I would like to ask you is: what does photography mean to you? Where does photography sit? Do you work in order to be able to buy a new camera? Or is a Saturday out with the camera club genuinely enough of an outlet for your passion?

I notice I think about this subject a lot myself. What does photography mean to me, and what would happen if I were, unexpectedly, driven back into marketing?

What if my steadily worsening eyes (varifocals, and reading turns out to be a challenge again and again) mean this does not work out? For me it is the other way round. What if photography falls away?

No solution

Unfortunately I do not have the answer. I cannot choose for you whether to take the step to professional photographer, and perhaps that step is not needed at all. Perhaps with less effort and less risk you can still give photography the place in your life you think it deserves. Perhaps it already has it.

What I do want to ask you, if you have ever thought “tomorrow I become a photographer”, is what tomorrow is. What are you missing now that you only want to do tomorrow? Just go for it. Even if it is only booking that photo trip to Iceland. Join a camera club. Take that course. Small dreams first. Today is your day.

“And to the things in the room I say goodnight
Tonight we go to sleep and tomorrow we shall see”

No, Boudewijn (de Groot, ed.). Today we shall see. Tomorrow is only a vague notion.

This article first appeared on Photofacts.nl (the biggest photography platform in the Netherlands), for which I have written a monthly column since 2025.