Can you help answer some photography questions for a class I am in?

[u/SCWashu]

I am enrolled in a class, and we have to ask amateur and/or professional photographers six questions. If you have the time to answer these, I would greatly appreciate it:

1. Do you consider yourself an amateur or a professional?
   
2. What does a professional demeanor mean to you, and how does it affect how you approach your work?
   
3. Do you have a specialization in the type of work you do or in how you approach your subjects? If so, how did you develop it?
   
4. Would you describe your journey from the time you realized you really enjoyed photography to the present? 
   
5. What do you envision as the next phase of your journey, or what else do you aspire to do?
   
6. I teach yearbook, and while I take photos on my own, I would say I only have experience taking photos that have a story to them for our yearbook and taking photographs of flowers. I would like to push more into professional photography and enter competitions or have gallery pieces. What advice do you have for someone in my situation? 

[u/rmric0]

Sure, why not?

1. Professional

2. I don't think it's substantially different from any other service business, you want to be polite and respectful toward the client and other people that you're working with to facilitate good communication. Often the biggest boundary tends to be touch, so most of my workflow for posing involves building a rapport for verbal instructions and then helping the clients to mirror my movements.

3. As a wedding photographer I tend to be more of a generalist, though recently the events I'm covering tend to be a little shorter and more intimate which means more direct contact with the clients and their guests. The biggest driver for that was changing how I presented packages and having more transparent pricing on my site, it made things more approachable for couples that are having smaller events to know that's something I could help with (and then once you start showing those events you start booking more)

4. I was handed a camera as part of a job and honed my skills because I had to. When I was let go from taht job photography was good for getting a bit of money in when I was underemployed, so it's really the story of a snowball slowly rolling down a hill.

5. I've stalled out lately both creatively and professionally, I'd like to be able to do more self-directed art projects and get in the habit of creating shoots instead of just rolling up to a wedding.

6. I don't do a lot of competitions or fine art work at the moment - if you're looking locally it's good to get to know the arts community and the people that are running galleries and judging art shows because these things are just as personal/political as anything else.