I am not so sure how big a threat it really is though. In fact I think hobby photographers in these cases are just a convenient scapegoat for the assorted woes of many professionals. And if the former represents any meaningful challenge, well, that doesn’t say much for the latter.

Let’s consider all this from the client’s perspective for a minute. They have a bucket of money called a budget and their challenge is to exchange it for the photographs that they need. Now they don’t actually get to see what they’re buying up front, because of course it‘s yet to be shot, so there’s an unavoidable element of risk associated with the process. And therefore an element of trust too.

And so if you were standing in their shoes, why would you actively embrace the risks that come with trusting someone who doesn’t at least do this thing for a living? One reason of course is price, but another is surely not knowing how much can go wrong. It’s a mistake you wouldn’t make twice.

Anyhow, what this is all leading to is a few thoughts on what separates professionals from hobbyists and why most clients just wouldn’t take the risk — and how there’s a lot more to it than turning up with a serious looking camera in your hand.

Put a bikini model in nice afternoon light and anyone with a half-way decent camera should produce half-way decent pictures. But when the scenario doesn’t offer the leverage of good looks and great light, it’s the guy that’s been doing this day-in, day-out for years that will have some creative concept in their visual vocabulary that makes it work. That’s not to say that the working photographer is by definition always better than the enthusiast. But all things being equal, you’d want to imagine the professional would produce better photographs for their efforts and for obvious reasons — they’re the professional. In any event, there are some very important distinctions that go well beyond the pictures that you end up with at the completion of the shoot. They’re about ensuring you actually get that far.

As these things don’t always end up as you might envisage, professionals have to ensure that in such circumstances they have a plan. Doing this full-time, they know that statistically sooner or later it’s going to be tested.

Everywhere you look there’s the need for a safety-net to protect the client and yourself. It’s having the insurance arrangements you think you’ll never need (and probably won’t) but if you do, you really, really do. It’s knowing how to have loan equipment delivered within the hour when a last-minute disaster strikes your own, so that the show can go on. It’s having a Plan B in the event of bad weather, missing models or a power-failure.

On these occasions you can improvise, adapt and overcome or you can stand around scratching your head wondering who to blame. It’s the sort of territory where that bucket of money starts to disappear without leaving pictures to show for it.

Preparation and planning are never as compelling as the creative stuff. But neglecting them can derail a shoot before it begins. So this due-dilligence is a big part of why we get to call ourselves professionals.

I know I am not alone in placing a big focus on redundancy from woe to go. Having procedures in place that will pull us out of a hole in the event of a major technology-meltdown lets me sleep easier.

Spare cameras and backup lens options are a part of it, but more important is proper Digital Asset Management.

Simultaneously a headache and an art-form, it’s probably the most unforgiving weak-point in the process. When you realise that for whatever reason you’ve lost a day’s pictures, you’ve not only already spent the client’s money on the models, makeup and overheads, they’ve probably already packed up and gone home. And so prevention is definitely better than cure.

Therefore, from the moment I press the shutter button each and every picture exists in two or more places until the finals are delivered to the client.

First, they’re simultaneously written to two memory cards inside the camera in case one gives up the ghost mid-shoot (it’s sure to happen one day). As we work, every image is transferred to a laptop on location that stores the day’s pictures on two separate hard drives.

Afterwards, everything is stored on a RAID attached to an office computer. The final step is offsite backup, and only then are the original memory cards formatted and the location laptop cleared for the next shoot.

Call me paranoid, but if I stop to run an errand on the way home, the laptop isn’t left in the car.

It’s not a big deal, just a mindset. The idea is to have catered for all the variables before one catches you out. And it’s not something that confronts you until you’re doing it full-time. Because the odds being that something will go eventually go wrong tends to focus the mind.

And really, it’s just being “professional”.