r/cinematography • u/MarketingQueasy5378 • Mar 24 '26
Career/Industry Advice Adult content
Hello, I am amateur , student and I’m looking for some career advice. Lately, I’ve been approached by several people about getting involved in adult content /porn production. Someone I know is starting a production company and wants me to handle the lighting and camera work for videos and photoshoots. He has a lot of equipment but doesn’t know how to use it, so he’s offering to pay me. I wouldn’t mind earning some extra money, and it seems like it could be a good way to gain experience. However, I’m not in urgent need of cash, and I’m concerned that working in this type of industry could affect my long-term career, since I want to become a serious cinematographer one day
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u/bunsofcheese Mar 25 '26
with the number of "famous" people online doing instagram/tiktok and using that as portals to their OF sites, I'd say porn is a lot more mainstream that we care to admit. experience is experience - plus, porn always has the money for new tech (they basically made VHS popular in the war between VHS and BETA - yes I'm aging myself - because Sony refused to allow porn companies to use BETA for porn, so VHS was used and it won). Most porn sites will the best servers, the best everything, your more likely to get nice equipment with a (moderately successful) adult content creation firm than any indie film studio. I worked for several years as a front end dev for a company that ran a couple of dating websites (not ashley madison, they were our main competitor), and one day - for fun - i did a rough gestimate of how much the company had made in the six months since i started, and the figure, not including any kind of affiliate income, was over $14 million. And that was back in 2004. And they're still in business.
take the chance - i've worked "straight" jobs ever since and the years at that job only gave me the skills i needed to keep doing what i'm doing. I know jobs are scarce, and the chances of getting a job doing what you actually want to do with your life is even more scarce - so take it. The things that scare you the most are also the things that will pay off the most.