By the time I was 22, I was a professional. A young and flawed professional, but not an amateur.
The difference between an amateur and a professional is in their habits. An amateur has amateur habits. A professional has professional habits. We can never free ourselves from habit. But we can replace bad habits with good ones.
As an amateur, you may envy the professional, wishing you could combine business with pleasure into a kind of full-time hobby, using professional equipment and facilities. However, the professional knows that much of the hidden advantage of being amateur is the freedom you have to shoot what and when you like.
Every honest researcher I know admits he's just a professional amateur. He's doing whatever he's doing for the first time. That makes him an amateur. He has sense enough to know that he's going to have a lot of trouble, so that makes him a professional.
I'm an amateur photographer, apart from being a professional one, and I think maybe my amateur pictures are the better ones.
I think of myself as an amateur filmmaker, not a professional, in the sense that "amateur" means love of something, for the form.
I've been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you. An amateur artist is one who works all week at something else so he can paint on Saturday and Sunday. A professional artist is one whose wife works so he can paint all the time.
It wasn't until '79 I won my first amateur championship, and then, by '81, I was 14, and I won my first world championship, which was amazing to me, and in a very real sense, that was the first real victory I had.
Some of our developers are starting to make $20,000 a month, which is really significant... We're getting developers who are 14 and 20 years of age making more money than their parents, starting to make a professional career of developing games on Roblox.
The difference between an amateur and a professional photographer is that the amateur thinks the camera does the work. And they treat the camera with a certain amount of reverence. It is all about the kind of lens you choose, the kind of film stock you use… exactly the sort of perfection of the camera. Whereas, the professional the real professional – treats the camera with unutterable disdain. They pick up the camera and sling it aside. Because they know it’s the eye and the brain that count, not the mechanism that gets between them and the subject that counts.
My first four fights in amateur at middleweight, and the first four professional were at welterweight. And I just kind of went down from there.
After I won my first amateur fight, I figured I would do fighting on the side while I was going to school. I got an offer after that amateur fight to take a professional fight. The opponent kind of wanted to have an easy win for her pro debt, and they said they'd pay me $1,500. I was like, 'Yeah, might as well get paid for what I was doing.'
I would hate to think I am not an amature. An amateur is one who loves what he is doing. Very often, I'm afraid, the professional hates what he is doing. So, I'd rather be an amateur.
Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the (i)noeme(i) of Photography.
Once the amateur's naive approach and humble willingness to learn fades away, the creative spirit of good photography dies with it. Every professional should remain always in his heart an amateur.
I think the greatest photographers are the amateur photographers who do it because they love it. Arnold Newman is a good example; he is a consummate professional, but he's also an 'amateur' in the pure sense of the word.