Hints...Well, the biggest chance of making a living for someone starting out is to get into wedding photography. It's really hard work creating a portfolio and in the end you are usually photographing a drunk, fat man eating a steak at the wedding party... You have to be prepared to do this, but you get paid for it. Personally, I'm not a fan of this area of photography- to put it in gentle words. Generally, I've never had the heart for documentary photography, because you can never truly create a scene, you just capture it. In studio photography / art photography you can spend hours perfecting one shot, you almost always get the desired result.