There's several British magaines which concentrate of computer graphics stuff (and which I've mostly bought for the stuff on cover CDs). I can't give you any exact pointers, but they have had articles on portfolios and how to avoid the common mistakes. It's worth checking. There's another side to arts courses -- learning the context, and the language people use to describe what they want, and what they're trying to produce. How do you tell a model to move in a particular way? Things like that. There's really two sorts of professional work. In one, you're trying to make something which you can sell later. Freelance landscape pictures that you could later submit to a calendar manufacturer, for instance. Stock photography in general. In the other, you already have the customer, and you have to satisfy them. Sometimes you have scope to try something new; some wedding photographer had to do a particular cliche the first time. But you have to provide the customer with what they pay for. The Stock Photography side is where you can experiment. You do not want to deal with the Bride's Mother when things go wrong.