James Duncan Davidson has a lengthy post Buck the Nonexistent Photo Guild (dead link not archived) about how photography for money has changed, mostly driven by technology.
One of the constant messages in photoblog circles is “Don’t work for free!” There are a bunch of arguments for this, from the formal to the informal, but they all pretty much boil down to the fear that if the market is served by others who undercut your prices, they’re reducing the amount of money you can make.
Photography for a living isn’t dead. It is just different, sometime harder because it is more accessible than ever, with cameras that makes things easier to learn and do, digital the make shot virtually cost-less, the Internet that allow spreading all of this knowledge even more widely.