To digress slightly... you're clearly ambitious and have an aim in mind. How do you plan to achieve that aim? I ask 'cos I haven't been taking photography seriously all that long and I've achieved a degree of competence within a narrow field. However my unusual academic and acrobatic background has made me really quite good at learning stuff and more importantly
working out how to learn stuff. If you want to turn pro* in just a year then you're going to have to do the same.
I'm assuming that you are basically a beginner and I'm trying to help you focus on some key skills. I'll start by asking some questions; I'm not expecting you to answer them in public but I think that if you want to turn pro in a year then you should have good answers to all of these:
- What are you doing to master the controls on your camera?
- How are you getting familiar with what your various lenses can do for you?
- How are you learning about composition?
- How are you getting familiar with the back office stuff - pc maintenance, backups, sensor cleaning, etc?
- What experiments are you doing to understand how to use light? (Even window light can be used in a huge number of ways. How many can you think of?)
- What are you doing to teach yourself post processing?
- How are you developing your portraiture & interaction skills?
- What are you doing to learn about marketing, book-keeping, social media, business plans and the like?
- What are you going to do to master print preparation?
- How are you going to learn about lighting?
- You say you don't want to pose people but how are you going to learn to create natural looking situations which produce semi-candid shots?
- How are you going to find about what you haven't even thought of yet?
- And the hard one.. how are you going to learn to use photography to communicate?
I don't want to turn pro, but I do want to produce professional quality work. And I've got answers to nearly all of those questions.
It boils down to directed practice - it's no good just doing stuff and repeating your mistakes. You have to really
think about what you are doing and why, and then you have to analyse the results. For instance you can set yourself exercises to master the camera controls, e.g. use it without looking at the rear or top screen at all, try to use it without looking for the buttons, spend a few weeks exclusively with each of the focus modes in turn and so on. Then work out what went wrong - and regularly ask for feedback.
It is quite possible to learn by muddling through but it will take a lot longer. And it's possible that you have a natural instinct for one or more of the above; realistically that'll only give you a slight head start.
You don't need to restrict yourself to portraiture to devise exercises to improve your skills. You'll need to specialise for a while but if you really are a beginner then not just yet.
It's really worth paying for some 1-1 training if you can find someone good but there are lots of good online resources.
I reckon that if you're working full time at the moment then it might be possible to get enough of those skills together in a year - if you're really focused and do
meaningful, directed practice every day. (For instance just today I've worked out that I get slightly more consistent focusing results with a really shallow depth of field at long focal lengths if I use single-shot rather than continuous autofocus mode on my new camera. Over the next few weeks I'll spend some time working out how to get the best out of AF-C on it. Some of that time will be spent photographing passing cars at a variety of angles and distances.)
To do it in a year you'll have to avoid getting bogged down in either lighting or post-processing like I did.
Obviously I've made a lot of assumptions about your current skill level; maybe you can do three quarters of this stuff already. And maybe you learn more quickly than me. I'm not trying to put you off, just sharing an approach which has worked for me.
*there are some photographers who charge money but produce shocking work. I'm assuming that you don't want to produce high volume low grade cheap stuff. If that's your ambition then much of the rest of this post won't really apply.
PS the 85mm focal length works well for considered portraiture; I find it a little bit tricky to use it to catch kids in motion.