tips for portfolio photography

Photographers might choose to assemble their work in a portfolio to share with friends and family, while another photographer plans to use the photographs as the sole means of support.

A bound book of selected works is a possibility as is a collection posted on a website. The target audience is the important consideration when choosing a carrier for the portfolio. Traditional artists may prefer printed images, while others might prefer the convenience of a website.
Decide on the target audiences before you start if possible. This may save you time and money. Multiple portfolios will require multiple prints. Photographs are easily copied from one digital portfolio to another, but prints take time and energy. Making multiple copies at one time and in one place will be less expensive and time consuming if plans are organized ahead of the start.

Assemble existent photographs in the chosen format and take stock of your product.

Choose the perfect number of photographs for inclusion in your portfolio. Make sure that the work prepared for presentation is an outstanding showcase of your skill as an artist and a craftsman. A limited number of photographs may not show the depth of your talent, while too many photographs might distract from the best of your collection.

Decide on steps needed for perfection. Images might need some tweaking for a better print while others might be superior with a better crop. Complete the computer or darkroom work necessary. Work toward perfection before moving to marketing to your target audience.

Market, display or share the perfected portfolio depending on your objectives.

Creating a showcase of photographs is not an easy task and most of the time the photographers have basic or no knowledge of design at all. Moreover, creating such a portfolio in which the images have to be in focus is a tricky task and even the more experienced designers might fail providing a good layout, therefore I thought of sharing with you a list of tips for designing photography portfolios.

Yes, youandve heard this before so many times and I know it annoys you. It is so simple to just overlook it and why not do it? In the end all of us want as many clients as possible and donandt want to make our audience narrow. Well, I tend not to agree with you, and I would suggest you to think seriously about who you want to work with. A good example is a wedding photographer this page would be totally different from the one of a roadshow photographer. It will probably be white, including many circles which suggest continuity, will have maybe floral arrangements and might be full of happiness and sunshine. If you are a roadshow photographer, you might want to design with a darker color, keeping a balance between organized and chaotic although do not get too close to organized and so on. Think of what kind of clients you want to attract and then design for them. It is so important

You have to do this because most of the layouts look good with a small number of pictures uploaded, but how will it look when you will have an odd number of pictures to show? There needs to be a balance between the number of pictures on the page and the negative space you leave between or around them. If you have many pictures, consider using pagination or categories to separate them and do it for the sake of the user. Donandt forget that they never saw you pictures before and if you are really interested in them, it takes a lot of effort for the human eye to analyze them. Donandt make it even more difficult for the visitors.

When I say this, I usually mean keeping a high contrast between the pictures and the background; and I usually recommend having black as background, because there is most of the time more contrast than when viewing the showcase on white. This tip is good for bringing out the contrast of the photos and it is also a good idea to try to look at the pictures on different backgrounds, so that you make the best out of them.