Remember, your knowledge is your prime asset, just as with traditional photography. If you're not sure about anything else, start learning Photoshop and get comfortable with computers. (If you're reading this, you must be somewhat comfortable with computers).

I like the Photoshop Bible, and the Real World Photoshop books. Ease into it. There are a lot of books that seem impressive when you're learning stuff for the first time, but are terribly simple with not a lot of real information, which becomes apparent as soon as you start to learn this stuff. I remember being overwhelmed the first time I read a Popular Photography with all the talk about F-stops and shutter speeds, etc. Before too long, I realized I wouldn't need to buy a book about just basic exposure. A lot of the books out there are like that so if you think a book looks good, wait a month and see if you're still impressed.

Once you learn the basics, you can start by shooting film and scanning. Or you may rent equipment or a digital studio, booking a tech savvy assistant to get you over the hurdles. Remember, you're being hired for your photographic knowledge. Let someone else worry about hooking up camera to computer and getting it to work. This will give you a chance to learn while you find out what your clients need and how you can make money doing it.

One thing to figure out is what kind of shooting will you be doing. Digital is great if you need to get a volume of shots out the door in a short time. Catalog, retail newspaper ads, small brochures would all be happy with smaller file sizes. But what if you're the kind of photographer that works two days for the "BIG HERO" shot? If a shot like that needs an 80-140 meg file, think about the cost of the camera that does that. With what it would cost to amortize that piece of equipment, unless you know you're going to shoot a lot of that sort of thing, it would probably be cheaper to shoot film and throw in the scan for free. Not that I recommend free scans, but you get the idea.