So you want to be a photographer?

It's that time of year again when professionals are beset by newly graduated students hoping for work. Every summer UK colleges spit out 3,000 or so of the hopefuls. It's like watching baby turtles running for the sea, you know most can't possibly survive, but you feel sorry there is nothing you can do.

And there really isn't. As I said in recent rant on Journalism.co.uk, who needs professional photographers? This is a horridly overcrowded profession these days, under pressure from every aspect. A couple of things that happened today make the point, which nobody seems to have taken the trouble to explain to students during their accumulation of student debt.

I know a technician who works for Mercedes. He and his colleagues were photographed for the in-house magazine today. The photographer was not a pro, he was one of the managers working to a brief he'd been sent by the PR dept. It'll likely be good enough.

This isn't exactly glamorous stuff, but it used to form the bread and butter of most professionals and allowed enough stability to work on more interesting and ambitious projects. Now that has gone. Every office in the land has a digicam and someone who knows which way up to hold it.

The editorial market is a disaster area too. As we never tire of discussing at www.epuk.org, newspapers are still paying late 1980's rates, or less. News seems certain to dispense with shooting stills altogether and switch to video within a few years.

The vast majority of UK magazine publishers now expect All Rights in commissioned material, and few pay more than they did 10-20 years ago for First Rights. You won't find much recent UK magazine work in my portfolio, I sacked them all. The trouble is that they seem to have no problem finding photographers anxious to get a foot in the door, even if it turns out to be a revolving one as soon as they try and obtain viable terms. What may seem OK to a green new graduate is simply untenable a few years later when they have families to support. 'Getting established' is a myth.

Which brings me back to students and their hopes of working and prospering in this chaos. They are only looking for work experience because they believe there is a viable profession at the end of it. The reality is that young, clueless and cheap is what the industry actually wants. Why did their lecturers not tell them? This is easily understood of course, since colleges these days are themselves enterprises; who in their right mind is going to send their customers away to think again?

For instance, I had one email from an MA 'I am beginning to wonder if there are any jobs for Fine Art/Landscape photographers?'

Of course there bloody aren't, there are about half a dozen in UK who actually manage to survive on print sales and seminars. Shockingly, nobody had once discussed career prospects, if any, with the her during 5 years of full time further education. She'd completed her course hoping to find a job ad 'Wanted : Fay Godwin-esque photographer, immediate start £30k'. Well, she had a CV like Bertrand Russell & David Hockney combined, maybe she'll get lucky, but I wouldn't bet a career on it.

And then there was today's Art School graduate looking for an opening. A social documentary enthusiast. Well, that's my kind of photography too, but it has been clear from way before I started back in 1980 that genre is flogging a dead horse where money is concerned.

You can sort-of adapt the same skills and interests to different niches, and this young guy had - his folio was on www.MySpace.com, mobile phone documentary pics of his hometown and a chill-out club soundtrack. All very cool and even a few nice images. But nobody is ever going to pay a penny for any of it.

The best advice I could offer him is to demand his course fees be refunded by the college, because they have equipped him for a life of flipping burgers, not pro photography.

Most photographers find themselves driven toward becoming pro's by necessity. Passionate attachment to photography makes heroin addiction seem cheap and you have to pay for it somehow. But colleges surely ought to educate, just as rehab clinics do. Pro photography is now about the least sensible way to support a love of photography. Almost any day job will earn more and provide more leisure time.

Lecturers need to grab these wide-eyed naifs by the neckstrap and point out that which is so glaringly obvious : that if you hope to make anything like a decent living in the next 45 years, you should not ponce around social documenting your mates nor Deardorffing Moonrise over Horsham. Instead go for lurid upskirt shots of drunk celeb's and footballers. Or just cut out the expensive self-indulgence of college altogether, and get a proper job. It'll save time in the long run.

For those who really, really have to do it, because they won't be happy doing anything else, my commiserations on your affliction. I offer the following crash course in business realities:

• Never give up copyright. It is your only asset. That is why everybody else wants it, so it's their asset, not yours. Can you buy a house for the same cost as a year's rental?
• It's an industry-standard fib that working cheap now will secure you better work long-term. There is almost invariably no jam tomorrow. Put the promised jam in writing as a contract and ask them to sign it.
• Saying 'no thanks' is better than working too cheaply. You can lay in bed and starve, or shoot social documentary and starve, rather than running around shooting rubbish work and starving slightly slower.
• 'We have no budget' is not flattering, it values your work at less than a paperclip. 'It'll be great publicity' presumes someone somewhere is gagging to pay you. Demand to know who!
• Remember your job is to solve the client's problem, nothing else. Try and forge mutually stimulating and rewarding relationships. Mutual benefit is the only sustainable form of loyalty in business.
• Read up on the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act. for the other buggers.
• Once you've done freelance photography for 15 or so years, you will be hugely multiskilled, and more or less totally unemployable. College lecturer perhaps?.