How many pictures and what should you include in your portfolio

Hereands the killer: your portfolio should contain only 8 to 12 pictures. Photo buyers are busy people. The worst thing you can do is to swamp them with photos that are redundant. You might be the best rose photographer in the world, but showing 35 pictures of roses will mark you as an amateur. Think first: What are you good at? I am good at landscapes, architecture, and flowers, and I can come up with a few decent people pictures. My portfolio would target buyers who want landscape and nature photos rather than urban street scenes or baby portraits. I would include varied viewpoints of New England scenes, details like stone walls and weather vanes, macro flowers, and people as compositional elements in the landscape. I would not show a portfolio of portraits, because it would imply that I do this type of work very well a falsehood that I canandt deliver on. A portfolio can include your aspirations as well as your accomplishments, but you must be able to do the type of work youandre looking for.