Should photographers work for free?

Run, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Evening shadows, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

I got recently a proposal to take photographs of "running", for a hobbyist (?) web site they are building up. An interesting (and a well-meaning) proposal, but I'm not keen on such things.

As I have written here previously: "What I don't want to happen is that photography becomes too serious. That happened with my writing. In my teens I was writing for fun [...] but later it turned into work - now I'm at over 600 published texts and several dozen books. [...] I don't want to turn photography into a profession as well."

I have a feeling that when photography starts to become too serious, I'll start running away, fast, and invent some other fun thing to do.

In any case, here are two recent black and white photographs. I'm back to work from vacation, so I'll be quite busy for a while and do less blogging.