AFTER Natasha Cuevas’s daughter, Dakotah, was born in 2003, she wanted to capture every moment of her babyhood on film. A year and many hundreds of prints later, Mrs. Cuevas decided that it was time to invest in the new high-end digital camera she had been coveting.

The pictures were luminous — so detailed that she could count Dakotah’s long eyelashes in them. Soon, women in her moms group in Fort Myers, Fla., were asking if she could take pictures of their children.

“I realized that I could actually get paid doing what I loved — photographing babies and newborns,” she said. So when her daughter was 18 months old, Natasha Cuevas Photography was born.

As digital single-lens-reflex cameras have become more affordable, more people — overwhelmingly women, according to the Professional Photographers of America — are starting photography businesses. They often begin as part-time ventures, sometimes on top of full-time employment elsewhere.

Sales of digital cameras, especially the higher-end S.L.R.’s, have skyrocketed. High-resolution cameras with more than six megapixels are the fastest-growing segment of the camera industry, jumping to 36 percent of the market in 2006 from 21 percent in 2005, according to the Consumer Electronics Association.

Almost all the buyers already own digital cameras, but the new S.L.R.’s, with their quick auto focus, lighter weight and cheaper-than-last-year price, prove too tempting.

And buyers can use the money-making potential of their new businesses to justify their purchases. Acquiring a name for the business seems simple; many women just tack the word “photography” after their own names. Many have no need for a studio, because most of the pictures are shot in natural light outside, or at the client’s home.

Marketing is often by word of mouth. When Jodie Otte (of J. Otte Photography) started her full-time business two years ago, she printed business cards after every photo session, knowing that her clients would pass them along if the cards featured pictures of their own children.

Other women have engineered portrait parties, where several families get together and the budding photographer snaps portraits of the children at play. If the parents like the results, they tell their friends and playgroups, and the photographer’s phone starts ringing.

The rise of photography start-ups is helping other businesses as well. BluDomain, a company that designs Web site templates specifically for photographers, introduces about 100 new sites for clients each month. For $800, a new photographer can have her portfolio designed as a flash-driven, fully editable site with proofing galleries and video.

Laura Brophy (of Laura Brophy Photography) started her part-time business last year in Canandaigua, N.Y., with a Canon EOS 20D and a Web site from BigBlackBag.com, which cost her $25 a month. Now, with brisk business in high school senior portraits, thanks mostly to friends of her teenage children spreading the word on MySpace.com, she is upgrading to a BluDomain site this month.

Although there are no figures tracking start-up photography businesses, Dana Groves, director of marketing and communications at the Professional Photographers of America, says the industry has expanded rapidly in recent years. In response, the association in 2004 created a retreat called “Chicks Who Click;” this June, about 250 women will meet at the event in the Bahamas.

Because the overhead can be minimal — some business cards and a lot of chatting on playgrounds — and because many new photographers have either a full-time job or a husband with one, they can afford to charge less than professional photographers. The professionals, who assert that they offer better quality because of their experience and studio equipment, may charge from $50 to several hundred dollars for an 8-by-10-inch print.

Some large studios and old-guard photographers are feeling undercut; the backlash is apparent on many photography message boards, where “MWAC” means Mom With a Camera.

“It’s the established portrait studio guy who is scared that moms are taking cool photographs and selling them for $10 for an 8-by-10,” said Kirk Voclain, a portrait studio photographer in Louisiana who owns Pro4uM, a professional photographers message board that has been host for some battles between the old guard and moms new to the business.

SETTING prices for children’s portraits can be daunting for people who are just starting in the business. Some feel that building relationships with their clients is more important than immediate profit.

The new crop of photographers also tends to shy away from shooting weddings, even though they are lucrative jobs. Many cite a lack of creativity in posed wedding portraits and the pressure to document every moment of the big day. These photographers prefer the informal, low-pressure setting of snapping pictures while babies sleep or teenagers preen.

Unlike some women who have a casual relationship with the business side of photography, Mrs. Brophy has a marketing plan and has reinvested all her earnings in lenses, lights, backdrops for her home studio, brochures and her new BluDomain Web site. She also has her eye on a new Canon.

As new digital cameras come to market, with lower prices and more features than last year’s models, new photographers cannot help yearning for the latest versions. Still, many are quick to say that the photographer’s eye matters much more than the camera, and that the ability to use technology and respond to light is what makes an image come to life.

That is why they smile when some owners of fancy S.L.R.’s put their camera on automatic settings and then complain that their pictures look like ordinary snapshots, albeit with very high resolution.

This is cache, read story here