In this post, we’ll take a look at how to evaluate your photography to find winning photos, the software tools and techniques to make that search easier, and the actual technical considerations involved in preparing your photos for an online or print portfolio.

Evaluating Your Photography

One of the biggest challenges involved in creating any portfolio or retrospective of your work as an artist is balancing your personal feelings towards the photos with the expectations of your viewers. While you might love a photograph because it represents something special to you, if your viewers don’t have that same connection, they won’t see it in the same way as you.

If you’re like many portrait photographers, who’s portfolio also represents a key marketing tool for their business, this issue only becomes more complicated. Now, you not only have an artistic consideration, but also a business one. Your portfolio needs to attract new clients, inspire existing ones to book you again, and represent your work in the best light. Depending on how you approach your business, you might rank each of these priorities differently. For instance, if you’re just getting started, you might need to put up whatever photos you have to start building a presence, while planning on quickly updating as you get more opportunities. If you’re already very established, it still might be worth re-examining your portfolio. Trends change, and your portfolio should too.

Regardless of which approach you take, a portfolio should always be composed of your best images. This isn’t a client gallery or a place to store your photos online. Instead, it’s a selection of photos that should each leave a client or viewer impressed. These are the “wow” photos, and it’s unrealistic to expect multiple photos from a single shoot that are truly portfolio worthy. Of course, if you’re new to portrait photography, it’s ok to work in multiple photos from a single shoot, but just remember to mix in some new material whenever possible.

On the question of quantity, for a portrait portfolio, I feel that less than 20 pictures should be able to help a viewer understand your body of work. If you work in multiple styles or genres of photography, consider splitting your portfolio up into separate instances. A wedding portfolio, a senior photography portfolio, and a corporate headshot portfolio can all work well as separate pages on your website, but may clash if you try to combine them all into one.

When working with such a small number of photos, don’t forget to prioritize variety within each genre. Consider mixing different post-processing styles, like color and B&W, wide photos and tight portraits, and a mix of subjects. Even within a very specific niche, you should be able to highlight a range of looks – you never know which one will resonate with your viewer or client. Another important attribute to keep in mind when selecting images is the expressions of the subjects. Finding a variety of looks may be challenging in some niches, but can make a big difference in separating your work from the perception of static, boring portfolios.

Depending on your region and local laws, there may be rules and regulations surrounding how you can use your client’s likeness. Even beyond the legal requirement, there’s also the customer service dimension – you don’t want to surprise your client by having put their picture online without their advance knowledge. To reduce this risk, make sure you’ve consulted with a legal professional and developed a clause in your contract appropriate for the situation. Even beyond that, I’d recommend directly contacting the client and confirming that they’d be good with you using their picture in your online portfolio. In my experience, everyone’s been happy to be asked, and it’s better safe than sorry.

If you’ve found that you don’t have enough range, or just haven’t had enough opportunity to shoot, consider setting up a styled shoot, specific for your portfolio. One important thing to keep in mind is that this shoot isn’t going to have the challenges of a real shoot with a client, so make sure what you produce is something you’d be capable of creating on an actual booking. With that in mind, a styled shoot can be a great way to branch into new areas, highlight a new style of post-processing, or update your portfolio to include new scenery if you’ve recently moved.

Tools of the Trade

Now that we’ve considered what are some of the important design considerations behind choosing photos for your perfect portrait photography portfolio, let’s look at some of the best tools and techniques you can use when selecting your photos. Culling, or selecting the best images, can be time consuming. Depending on how you have stored your photos, you may have to go through dozens of folders and search through a variety of storage mediums. Fortunately, there’s a variety of software options to help make this search easier.

One of my favorite tools for searching through a photography library is Lightroom. Created by Adobe, the makers of Photoshop, Lightroom is a combination of a great raw image processor and easy to use digital asset management tool. This means it not only will edit your photos, but also let you track, tag, keyword, and manage where those photos are.

Even if you haven’t been using Lightroom for editing, I’d still suggest taking a look at it solely for its digital asset management capabilities. Compared to competing options, Lightroom has some of the best options for organizing and browsing even large libraries of photos. The initial import of a large library not already in Lightroom might take a few minutes, but I think it’s worth it. There are a variety of views available for culling, along with automated tools for organizing photos based on keywords or flags, and even a facial recognition and sorting function. With these features all in one package, Lightroom is an incredibly powerful tool for organizing and sorting even large photo libraries, and it’s an industry standard for a reason.

If you aren’t interested in purchasing Lightroom or subscribing to Adobe’s Creative Cloud offerings, there are still workable options. Darktable is a powerful open source photography application that offers many similar features to Lightroom, including the ability to organize your photos in a database. For smaller libraries, even something like iPhoto can work, although I’d strongly suggest trying at least Darktable – the gap between consumer and professional grade software is huge when working at the higher levels of photography.

When actually browsing through your images, don’t worry about cutting everything down to a final set in a single pass. Instead, try grabbing 100 of the best into a temporary folder, collection, or color label, then look to cut that in half by eliminating the weaker of two similar photos. From there, it’s just one more pass to reach a final figure of 20 or 25. In this way, you can work to emphasize a variety of portraits and styles from across your work. It also has the benefit of making the task a little less daunting to start!

In Lightroom, if you already are making use of the rating systems like flags, stars, or color labels, you don’t have to worry about messing that up. Just use a quick collection, which by default is the B key, to pull that initial set of photos. From there, you can access the quick collection itself, and remove photos by selecting them and pressing the B key again. Once you’ve got a final batch selected, you can even save this temporary collection as a permanent one, making it easy to refer to in the future!

The Technical Considerations

With your intended portfolio images in mind, there’s only one last step before you can upload or print: creating the best quality version for your intended medium. If you’re like many photographers and are intending to produce an online portfolio,there are a  number of important technical considerations to keep in mind when setting up your export. For a print portfolio, you’ll actually want to prepare your files entirely differently from a web image.

Exporting images for use in a web portfolio is relatively easy. There’s no need to make it overly complicated. In fact, most of the major mistakes involved in creating a web ready image actually come from using overly complicated settings. Your final file should be a JPEG with an sRGB color space, typically resized to a more manageable size (but maybe larger than you think if you’ve been a photographer for a while). Let’s take a look at each of those attributes to better understand why they’re configured how they are, as well as how to set them up in Lightroom. 

The most important part of a properly exported file is the file type. While you might be shooting in a raw format like .NEF or .CR3, then editing and saving them as .TIFF or .PSD, you have to be exporting them as a JPEG. This format is by far the most interoperable image format – any service on the web and any device around can typically display it. Besides the size savings on your web server, you can be confident that the file will open and appear properly anywhere you choose to display it.

Don’t forget, however, that going to JPEG is a lossy process. This means that it saves space by throwing away some unneeded parts of the image. Ordinarily, this isn’t a problem, but if you save a JPEG, go back and tweak something, and save it again, you’ll start to lose image quality. Instead, keep using a proper intermediate format like .TIFF or .PSD, and only export a JPEG as a final step.

When choosing a JPEG format, you’ll often be prompted to select the amount of compression you want to apply. Each program can present this option in a different way, like on a scale of 1 to 100, 1 to 12, or 1 to 10. As a good rule of thumb, 80% compression with a JPEG is considered perceptually lossless, i.e. an uncompressed and compressed image will be indistinguishable. For web sized images, you can even apply more compression, depending on the service, but we’ll talk more about this in the image size section.

Along with the proper format, you should also be saving the file with the proper color space. Digital color can become incredibly complicated very quickly, so as a quick recap, remember that color spaces like AdobeRGB and ProPhoto offer a “broader” range of colors, but are often unsupported by things like low end print kiosks and some web browsers. What this means for you is that if you already work in a non-sRGB color space, don’t forget to convert back to sRGB when exporting a finished file.

One final setting to keep in mind is the actual resolution of the image. The size of the image plays an important role in both the viewer’s experience and appreciation of the image, as well as having an impact on your portfolio’s setup. While a larger image is almost always better, it does come with the downside of taking longer to download, as well as potentially being more susceptible to image theft.

These days, many devices have screens that have significantly more resolution than even the older Full HD standard of 1920×1080, making old web resolutions like 1000 pixels or 720P seem small. Retina displays, 4K displays, and phones with over 2K resolution are all common, especially among higher income clients. Fortunately, internet speeds have also kept up, making download time less of a consideration. As a result, I’d advise considering something like 2000 pixels along the long edge to be the minimum resolution you use. If your web hosting setup supports dynamic resizing of images, all the better! In that case, export something like a 4000 pixel long image and let your server feed the appropriate size image to each user.

For these larger images, you can actually increase the amount of compression applied. By going to 65% or 75%, you can still create a very good looking image that’s light enough to download even over slow internet. For a variety of reasons, including SEO and user experience, it’s important that all your images download quickly. Consider testing the finished version of your portfolio over a slower connection to make sure the experience is still good, and consider decreasing the size or increasing the compression if it isn’t. 

In print, things can vary depending on how you’re printing. If you’re using a quick, local lab like Walgreens, I’d just suggest exporting an sRGB JPEG at full resolution and with minimal compression – the print quality isn’t going to be high enough for more complicated options to matter. When working with a dedicated photo printer, lab, or when printing your own work, things can get a bit more complicated. 

Any good print lab should have a guide of the file setup they’d like. Some will support larger color spaces, take TIFFs, or offer printer profiles. Printer profiling essentially lets you get a more accurate preview of what the finished product will look like, right on your monitor. This lets you make adjustments ahead of time to get the best result possible on the first print. 

Conclusion

Creating a perfect portrait photography portfolio starts with a good understanding of what your clients are looking for. Keeping it to a reasonable, effective number of photos makes it easier to grasp what look you offer, even if it means a bit more work on your part. Fortunately, there’s a number of effective tools, like Lightroom and Darktable, to help you with this process. When you’ve finally got those winners in mind, don’t forget to export with the display medium in mind!

Thankfully, the internet and digital age have brought upon us a wave of free information, tools, and services that can make many parts of your photography business significantly less expensive. Being thrifty is vital to the success of many new business ventures, and it is especially so when so much photographic equipment is both expensive and necessary.

Let’s take a look at some of the best free tools for your photography business.

Website creation and Development

The fees and costs of running a website and online portfolio surely add up. Some of these costs are necessary; the allocation of server space and the cost for a domain, for instance. Some paid plugins and templates for your website might be worth the professional look they afford you, but that’s your choice to make. On the other hand, let’s take a look at some of the best free resources for someone starting out their website.

Domainr

Domainr is a simple tool; it lets you check if your prospective website domain names (the actual name of the website such as amazon.com) are available. When coming up with your website name, it’s important to see the options and see if you can actually use it. This is especially true before you start creating marketing materials!

WordPress

WordPress is a great open-source website design tool that, due to its longevity and commercial success, is accompanied by easily searchable information that will surely cover all and any questions you may have. You can use WordPress for both a traditional website and a blog, and the amount of pre-built free templates, plugins, and options you have at your disposal is incredible. Additionally, WordPress bridges the gap between all-in-one website design businesses and starting from scratch – you aren’t getting the instant cookie-cutter look from a boutique website design that you would pay for, but you also aren’t tasked with immediately having to learn all the intricacies of website design. Lastly, WordPress is used by so many photographers and photograph centric businesses that any questions you have will probably have been asked and answered several times over. 

Backing up your photos

Photographs take up lots of space. Currently, my Canon CR3 RAW files are at least 30MB, each, and there are days where I shoot several thousand images. That means I have days where I literally shoot over 100 gigabytes of images. This means two things – firstly that I need to be good about managing my Lightroom backlog, and secondly that I need a lot of storage and backups. I definitely don’t keep every photo or even 10% of them, but I still have filled many, many hard drives, not to mention offsite storage. Thankfully, there are some great offsite storage solutions that are either free or relatively low in cost if needed.

Amazon Photos

If you are already paying for Amazon Prime, Amazon photos are bundled in your membership and allow you unlimited RAW storage. Sadly, for those of us using a file format such as the aforementioned CR3, it isn’t currently supported. Make sure to check if the file type that you shoot in is, or else you will have to painfully convert each image to one that is supported to upload it. I use Amazon Photos to backup all deliverable images and edits that I want easy access to from my phone. You can even set Amazon photos to auto-sync from your image library, such as where I import Lightroom photos to, but I prefer manually doing it as one of my final steps when working on files.

Google Photos

As someone that does not currently own a Google Pixel device, Google Photos makes me envious of those that do. Sadly no longer free for all users, Google Photos provides unlimited photo backup, albeit it will compress RAW files. This is still a great option for those wanting to save those finalized JPEGs.

Flickr

Although a recent change has made the free upload amount rather slim, using Flickr as a backup tool and somewhere to share some of your best work is definitely an option. I recommend using Flickr as somewhere to keep your ‘mega-portfolio’, or every photo that you would consider using in a future online portfolio. That makes it possible to even reach out to mentors or other photographers for fast critiques, editing or compositional suggestions, or any other advice you might want to receive. 

Dropbox

Lastly, Dropbox offers 3GB of free storage, with the possibility to increase that storage later on on a paid plan. Sadly, there isn’t currently any website that just offers free unlimited storage, and if that were the case, it would be hard to trust them to retain your files and have actual server uptime. These storage solutions might not let you save every single photo you have ever taken, but even as they stand, they are a better alternative than not having a single online backup. 

Finance and Business Tools

This is the boring part of the guide, but also the important part. A lot of finance and business based tools are expensive, often having high fees meant for large corporations to pay out. Let’s take a look at some of the better options for photographers that want to keep that overhead as low as possible. 

Flolu Photographer CRM

A CRM, or Customer Relationship Management Software, makes it easy to organize, price, and bill for your clients. Flolu isn’t really anything special – it’s marketed towards photographers, but isn’t any different from a basic CRM software, other than some slight difference in interface nomenclature. Despite this, what makes Flolu great is the price – it’s free, and a great step up from the use of unorganized spreadsheets. 

InvoiceToMe

I used to invoice only through Paypal, which meant that on each transaction I was losing out on money to pay for Paypal’s service and support. That isn’t a bad thing if you need the payment protection, but it really wasn’t something I needed. InvoiceToMe is a great place to throw together invoices for free, and it doesn’t require any hassle. Just open the link and type out what you need paid for!

Docracy

Docract is a fantastic website that allows you access to millions of legal documents that you don’t have to pay for. Contracts are just the starting point; you can find everything you will need here. Make sure to read them through yourself, however, as it’s just the best practice when using any open source legal literature. Down the road, if you find yourself reusing the same contracts over and over, it might be time to get a lawyer to draft a contract template for you!

With these three business side tools, you will be able to cut out the majority of the cost for your photography business. I hope that these resources, along with the others listed above, were helpful to you!

Writing Compelling Copy

There are several things you are going to need to consider when developing the copy for your website. We can break this down into two main categories: a style template and a style guide. These two tools you create will allow you to transform your copy into written work that reflects the continuity and quality of the rest of your website. Let’s get started with the latter: the style guide.

Building a style guide for your photography website

Creating a style guide early in the process of writing the copy for your website, or in the process of overhauling the copy of your website, is a really good idea. A style guide is essentially a big searchable document that tells you exactly how you are going to tackle different stylistic options each and every time they come up. For example, let’s say you’re a landscape photographer and you travel quite a bit. How will you write the locations of the photographs you create?

Thankfully, the internet provides many different resources for fantastic style guides. Take, for example, The Times’s Stylebook by the New York Times. You can base your website’s style off of a successful publication, like the New York Times, and improvise or adapt it as necessary. Add in your own photography specific jargon rules, and how you may want to present your photography, but follow a style guide for the rest of your photography. (Another great alternative to base your copy on is the Associated Press’s AP Stylebook.)

Once you have a style guide, make sure to expand upon it with things that may be missing. An example of this could be something like EXIF data. The New York Times isn’t including it with every photo, but is that something you want to do? If your website is more tailored to showcase your work to other photographers, maybe. On the other hand, if your photography website targets new customers, you may want to focus on other parts of your copy and leave out the technical details that are only interesting or understandable for other photographers.

The great part about building off of another style guide is how many of the decisions are made for you, and how easy they are to reference. If you posted something to your website now, and the next time you referenced a similar subject matter in your content is years from now, a style guide makes it easy to know exactly how to write about that content in a compelling fashion. It also establishes a form of professional continuity; the use of a style guide provides a high-level structure for your copy and makes sure that your copy is consistent throughout. 

Lastly, a style guide makes it much easier to outsource your work. In the future, you may want to hire a copy editor or even a writer to work on your website for you. In such a case, both said people would be ecstatic that a) the copy for your website follows a set of principles and b) they won’t have to make assumptions or delve through your past work to figure out your style, or to make nearly as many edits to it. 

Building Style Templates for your Photography Website

The next topic we are going to tackle is the use of templates. Templating style simply means that you have some form of pre-configured style that you will apply to each new upload, post, or update to your website. This can simply be a type of syntax you use, a maximum word count, a certain amount of words you want to aim for each image/session showcase, or anything similar. 

When building a style template, unlike the use of a style guide, I suggest that you create several different templates for each type of content that you are going to be publishing. Have templates for articles or blog posts you write, for single images or for sets, and for each distinct type of content that you regularly see yourself publishing. 

A style template doesn’t have to be long or brimming with information, the simpler it is, the better. You don’t want to be reading a 20-page, or even a several page, document each time you want to post a 50-word caption with an image. Instead, you want something that you keep next to you when getting ready to publish content, where you can skim what you need to create in terms of content to finish packaging that content for digital publication.

Style templates make it a lot easier for newcomers to browse your website, and can really help flush out the wholeness of your website design, making it feel much cleaner and well thought out. 

Actually Writing Better Copy

OK, so you have a style guide and a style template, it’s time to actually write… Maybe writing is something that comes naturally to you, and maybe it’s not. Either way, let’s work through some ways you can think about your copy and possibly improve it.

In my experience, and using some hyper-broad generalization, there are two types of writers. The first is the writer that can sit down and write a decent first draft, shaping their stream of consciousness. The second is the writer that cannot write a note on a post-it without first writing a three-page outline, with four colors of highlighters and APA citations. 

If you sit down to write something and are staring at a blank page, unable to produce anything, you might be identifying with the latter type of writer at that moment. In your word processor, change to bullet points, like this:

• The first thing you need to write on your first bullet point is this: What is the point of this post?
• Then, what restrictions does my style template create for me for this post?

Working from those two points, now create bullet points for everything that you might possibly want the copy of the content you are creating to reflect. Literally, every idea possible. It might be two pages, it might be two lines, either way, you have a  starting point. From there, build an outline. When writing outlines like this, I like to use multi-leveled bullet points. This is because it makes it easier to look back at the structure behind what I was thinking, looks pretty cool, and most importantly, takes up more of the page, so I think I’ve done more work. 

If you’re the stream of consciousness that gets blurted onto the page type of writer, you’re in luck, at least for your first draft. The downside of this style is, sadly, that you lack the crystal clear structure that outline based writing brings to the table. So, how do you combat this? Write more drafts. I’m not saying write drafts as you would for a thesis, but just write a second draft and try to create some form of an outline for what you want your content to say. The second draft might take you a bit longer, but by rewriting with all your ideas already on paper, your structure will improve.

Lastly, I want to talk about editing your copy. It’s super important. Unedited copy is going to have problems because it isn’t edited. Read back through your copy. If you’re a speed-reader or don’t generally find yourself editing when reading back through things you’ve written, stand up and read it out loud like a speech. That will help you isolate problems that you might be having when your copy sounds unnatural. Additionally, that should help you isolate when your syntax and word choice seem a bit too monotonous and boring. 

If you just can’t seem to edit those kinks out of your copy, it might be time to bring in someone else. Having another person edit, a nonjudgemental friend or significant other can make it a lot easier to learn what parts of your writing you need to work on. Have them read it, listen to you reading it, or listen to them read it aloud. See how that changes your interpretation of your writing, and don’t be defensive of any criticisms they may have.

At this point, all that’s really left to tell you is that the best way to actually improve your writing is like it tends to always be, with a whole lot of practice. You’re going to be able to write, edit, and publish a lot more quickly the more you do it, especially if you are following templates and guides along the way. Enjoy creating wonderful copy for your website!

• Aesthetics
• Technical considerations
• Watermarks

If you’re looking to get started with wedding photography, or are trying to improve your business prospects in the industry, creating a strong portfolio is a critical step. Check out these tips to start creating an amazing set of images that are sure to wow your future clients!

Aesthetics

The fundamental questions behind a photography portfolio can be summed up as “What do I want this to represent and who is my intended audience?”. Answering these questions can help you make smart decisions about every aspect of your portfolio, from the images chosen to the way the portfolio is designed.

For most wedding photographers, I expect the answer to the first part of that question will be “I want this to represent the style of wedding photography I like to shoot”. I think what’s important about that answer is the question of style. You might be a very formal and traditional wedding photographer, creating very classic images. You might instead be an available-light, journalistically minded wedding photographer – you’ll end up making very different portfolio decisions compared to that classically minded photographer, and that’s ok. A good portfolio isn’t just supposed to drive inquiries, but instead, help you find the right clients for you. Misrepresenting your style, experience, or intentions is just going to result in unhappy clients.

The question of an audience might seem relatively simple. After all, the answer is probably “couples planning a wedding”. In reality, there’s more to it than that. As I mentioned in the style point, with a little thought you can turn your portfolio into a powerful marketing and customer service tool. If you’ve got a strong local connection, make sure to prominently feature some local landmarks in your portfolio. If instead, your desired clients are planning destination weddings, take the chance to show off how you’ve adapted your art to a variety of locales. By better understanding who you want to work with, you can refine your portfolio to help those clients find you, without even having to force the issue.

As you build your mental picture of what your portfolio should represent and who your ideal client is, you might run into the first issue. If you’ve got a couple of answers to those questions, it’s understandable. The wedding market is competitive, and you might be loath to leave potential customers out. In that way, you might try and fit a ton of images into your portfolio, hoping to have something that appeals to everyone. After all, websites make it easy to just upload an entire Lightroom catalog’s worth of images. This isn’t a viable strategy, however. Too many photos in a single gallery are difficult to navigate, slows page load times, and takes the focus away from any single image.

Instead, try and focus on your strengths. Make sure that your portfolio represents the breadth of your skill and style, but consider pruning weaker images so that your winners really get a chance to shine. Even with just 20 or 30 images, you can show color as well as black and white work, portraits, detail shots, candids, and a few unique shots. I know it can be tough to eliminate those shots that you may personally feel connected to, but try to look at things clinically, and evaluate the message each shot sends to a potential client.

Also, consider the opportunity represented by having your portfolio online: it’s easy to continuously update things. As your style evolves and you have more opportunities to shoot, it’s easy to drop in new images and remove older pieces that are no longer representative. By doing this, you can keep improving your portfolio, as well as remain well adapted to the market.

How to Curate a Wedding Photography Portfolio

My favorite tool for curating is also one of the most common digital asset management tools: Lightroom. If you use a single master catalog for all your shoots, Lightroom makes it very easy to maintain a manual collection of your portfolio-worthy shots. If instead, you find that Lightroom works best for you with a variety of individual catalogs, perhaps per event, you can still export your shots with XMP enabled, and create a little catalog just for portfolio purposes.

One of the big reasons why I think Lightroom works so well for wedding photography portfolio curation is the variety of ways you can visualize and organize your work. Using a custom sort in grid view makes it easy to see how a page of thumbnails would look, while the variety of flags, stars, and color labels help you organize your images into subgroups.

Once you’ve got your images selected, Lightroom also has a number of convenient ways to export your images. Besides direct support for publishing to the web via Publish Services, the export dialog gives you great control over the technical aspects of the image file, including things like metadata, color space, and size.

If you’re not already a Lightroom user but are looking for a similar tool, consider Darktable. This open-source option offers many of the same features as Lightroom, making it a great way to get started with organizing your photos.

A final tip is don’t try and pick your final 30ish images from your entire catalog in one pass. Instead, start by selecting 100 or 200 shots that are strong images and represent your style well. Then, try to cut that in half, perhaps by running similar images head to head and retaining the stronger option. If you still need to cut further, consider prioritizing images by how well they work together, as well as individually.

Technical Considerations

Once you know what kind of photos you’re looking for, and you’ve gathered them together, next comes the important step of creating a final image file that works well from a technical perspective. While your website’s setup may influence the finer points of how this is done, in broad terms, a good image for web use should be in the sRGB color space, appropriately sized, and sharpened with that new size in mind.

Color space is one of the most important things to get right. While color management on the web and devices has come a long way in the last few years, color space issues can ruin the appearance of your images in an unparalleled way. These problems can leave your images looking washed out or garishly oversaturated. Fortunately, they’re easy to avoid. Just make sure that your final image is set up for the sRGB color space – broader color spaces like AdobeRGB and ProPhoto can be great for more advanced editing, but are not a good choice for consumer use on the web.

For size, I think the conventional expectations have grown outdated. In the past, web sizes were typically something like 1000 or 1500 pixels on the long side. These days, even phone’s displays can exceed that resolution, with Retina displays and 4K monitors increasingly common. As a result, consider uploading a larger size image. NextGEN Gallery offers easy resizing, making it possible to upload one size, then tweak it as needed.

If your website’s setup doesn’t support dynamically resizing, instead consider exporting at 2000 or 2500 pixels long, which I feel offers a good tradeoff between user experience, download times, and upload times. While less a consideration for wedding photographers when compared to some other photography genres, image theft can still be an issue. Larger images are potentially more attractive to steal, so it can be a factor as well when considering what size to choose. A good compromise may be to upload your wedding photography portfolio images at a larger size, while displaying things like proofing galleries at a smaller size or with a more prominent watermark.

For export sharpening, I like to keep things simple for web use. Lightroom allows you to apply an amount of sharpening on export, specifically calibrated for screen use. If you’re not using Lightroom, instead consider opening your image in Photoshop or your image editor of choice, and applying sharpening to taste after you’ve set your image’s final size.

One last consideration when preparing your wedding photography portfolio images for export is to tweak the brightness, contrast, and saturation. If your work is more subtle, uncalibrated consumer’s displays may leave it looking lifeless – consider combating this by adding a bump to brightness, contrast, and saturation. This step can be over-done, but it may be necessary to help your images retain the same visual impact compared to the hyper-saturated content that your viewers may be used to seeing.

Watermarks

The choice of whether to use watermarks or leave your images unmarked is a personal question. I know some photographers absolutely insist on having a large, noticeable watermark on every image they publish, while I’ve stopped using them years ago. For wedding photographers, whose work is often shared widely on social media, it might be worth adding them. 

For proofs, free images to share on social media, or other promotionally focused shots, I’d encourage putting a small, legible, but still artistic watermark in one corner of the image. This way, you don’t have to worry about having your clients spell your URL or tag you in the post. Lightroom offers great features regarding watermarking, including letting you build it right into one of your export presets, but the same functionality is easily accomplished in Photoshop by adding a text layer and adjusting the opacity.

For the portfolio, however, I feel that a watermark is unnecessary. Firstly, your potential visitors are already on your site, eliminating the marketing potential of the mark. Secondly, while watermarks can discourage casual image misappropriation, they have to be far too intrusive to ward off more determined image thefts – instead, consider using an image tracking service like Pixsy to find instances of image misuse.

The last point of contention when using watermarks relates back to those images shared on social media. Watermarking an image ties it very closely to your brand, which can be both good and bad. As discussed, it can be helpful to refer viewers back to your web presence, but it can also present problems. Once you’ve distributed that watermarked image, your clients may further edit it or add filters. While letting go of that creative control isn’t a critical issue for images just used by your clients, it can be problematic when combined with your watermark. Now, viewers’ first impression of your work may be significantly altered from what your style actually is.

Wedding Photography Portfolio Conclusion

Curating the perfect wedding portfolio doesn’t have to be difficult – consider it an exciting opportunity to better understand both your work and your clients. Fortunately, there are great tools like Lightroom and Darktable to make sorting through your library easier, and their great export options make it easy to create the perfect finished files. Once you’ve got your images in mind, consider creating a website to share them – Photocrati offers dozens of starting designs, responsive displays, built-in galleries perfect for portfolios, and ecommerce support, all in one WordPress theme. For more information on building a compelling photography portfolio, make sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for more updates!

What’s a Blog Content Strategy?

A blog content strategy is basically a blueprint for how your blog will develop over time. If you already have one, this guide will go over some different ways in which you can improve it. On the other hand, if you currently don’t have a blog content strategy for your blog, this article will illuminate some of the starting points and guidelines that you should keep in mind while developing your own blog content strategy.

Creation and Publications Schedules

One of the biggest things missing from the majority of content strategy development for creative endeavors, and specifically blogs, is creation and publication schedules. One of the easiest ways to develop and grow as a blog writer, and to do the same for your audience, is producing content on schedule. You want your audience to know when content is coming out, and forcing yourself to stick to a deadline schedule is the best way to both improve at working under pressure and as a writer. 

I recommend a two-pronged approach to schedule; separate creation and publication schedules. These are as simple as they sound: a creation schedule is when your final draft or publication-ready draft needs to be complete. The Creation schedule can also incorporate other details, such as: When will the first draft of this post be done? When will I have all the images embedded for this post done? This gives you a clear track for when you need to have free time in your schedule to get this work done.

Now, the publication schedule is more of a calendar. It tells you when you need to be publishing new content. Let’s say you start a blog with the goal to publish at least once a week. When is the best time to publish? This depends a lot on analytics, but choose a sensible starting time when you could expect readers to want to go to your blog, maybe a weekday morning. If your blog develops into multiple posts a week, consider changing your publication schedule to be a longer post at the same time each week, and then a shorter post or one in a different genre at a different point that splits the week in your publication schedule in half.

Why have separate schedules? Separate creation and publication schedules allow several things to occur. The first is going to be a slight backlog to publication, a rainy day fund of blog posts, if you will. This means that if you are going to take a vacation, you can have a creation schedule planned that covers that time. Secondly, these separate schedules can also protect work that you haven’t necessarily sent yet. For example, let’s say you are a portrait photographer, and your client knows that you will be writing a blog post about the images. You want to make sure that before you post this blog post, your client has received their images, and you have completed any second round or final edits that they may request. While your original creation schedule may have allotted time for this to happen, your client may have been non-responsive, and now your creation schedule is set back. This means that, because of that mini backlog of posts you have, you can continue to have content come out.

Different types of Content for your Photography Website

Your blog strategy needs to be diversified – not necessarily in the way that you think. While posting a variety of content may be the correct strategy for you, many blogs do amazing work because they focus solely on one type of content. By diversifying content, I don’t mean switching genres, I mean learning about evergreen and timely content, and using that understanding to your blog’s advantage.

So, what makes evergreen and timely content different? As simple as it sounds, evergreen content is content that can always be published to a similar effect, while timely content is content that will do much better if it is published at a specific time. A good example of this would be a post about how you captured photos of an event – such as a concert, or holiday event. A lot more clients and photographers are going to be interested in Christmas content near the holidays, and a lot more people at a concert are going to want to see photos from that concert in the days thereafter.

Now, let’s tie that back into your creation and publication schedules. Evergreen content isn’t tied to specific publication dates you have in mind, which means you can take a more relaxed approach to that content relative to timely content. Timely content needs to be out as soon as possible; think about how fast articles are posted both after and during sporting events. Those articles need to get out as fast as possible, often meaning that as a photographer for such events I am editing and publishing pictures while the teams are still on the field. 

Additionally, timely content tends to do better than evergreen content. The reason for this is simple: timely content naturally has a built-in hook when published at the right time. This is not today that evergreen content can never surpass timely content: most books are going to be evergreen. This is to say that timely content often can pull more readers onto your website in a shorter amount of time, leading them to discover more of your evergreen content that they may not have otherwise been able to find. 

What does your readership want?

Last, but certainly not least, is the importance of tailoring your content to your leadership. As you build a reader base, your content needs to reflect what they want to learn about. This is the reason that so many online blogs, vlogs, etc. that are photography-related create yearly “What’s in my bag?” type videos: the audience wants them. These videos are not that fun to create and aren’t creatively fulfilling, but they serve some part of the audience.

I am not advocating you to start a gear only blog, as that market has been saturated over and over. If you currently have a relatively small readership, those readers are there because they like your content, so what parts of that content do they like? Ask your readers for feedback and advice in the form of pitches. One of the hardest parts of content creation for a blog, as you progress as a writer and self-editor, is going to be coming up with content for those schedules you created. Keep a separate spreadsheet with different pitches readers have come up with, and see if those come up again, and again, and if that is something that you need to tackle.

Being in tune with the people reading your content as you continue to blog is the most surefire way to be making content that people will want to read. As basic and cliche as that sounds, sticking to what makes your content your content will continue to attract new readers with new ideas for you to develop over time.

Lastly, take every suggestion with a grain of salt. As I’m sure you’re aware of, the internet is an interesting place with a whole lot of people, and what might initially sound like a good and well-intentioned idea could be the opposite. Don’t fall into the trap of cyclical and boring content because it is what a few dedicated readers want; do so alongside new ideas that you have, as it is your original ideas that brought the readers there in the first place. 

This article will look at how to solve a number of challenges involved in curating the perfect landscape photography portfolio, including:

• The aesthetics and ideas that should drive your choice of photos
• The techniques for effectively curating a large library of photos
• The technical considerations of creating final versions of these shots
• The question of watermarking or otherwise protecting your art

The Aesthetics and Concepts Behind a Portfolio

The first question you have to answer to create a perfect landscape photography portfolio is: “What do I want my portfolio to do?”. What I mean by that is are you trying to sell your images, share your work with others, serve as a reference for contests or artistic endeavors, or something else? Each of these answers will mean you’ll want to make different decisions in every step of the process, including things like the images you choose, how you process them, to how you present them.

To make it even a bit more complex, you might say that your portfolio needs to cover a couple of these areas. Right now, you just want to share your work easily, but would also be open to selling an image or two to an interested buyer. Fortunately, with some careful consideration, you can craft a portfolio that can do all of these things at once, although it might take a little more careful thought than a single-purpose portfolio.

For the rest of this article, we’ll consider the average photographer whose portfolio needs to serve a couple of purposes. While it’s not solely commercial or artistic, it should be able to do both, and above all, put your work in the best light possible. If you find that you only need your portfolio to serve a specific purpose, consider which of the following aspects you can eliminate – a more focused portfolio, with every image being 5 stars, is a better choice than a portfolio with dozens of just-OK images.

Even if you need your portfolio to serve multiple purposes, don’t forget the underlying tension between portfolio size and quality. With a website, it’s easy to upload thousands of images, and quickly end up with dozens of galleries. While this can be an excellent way to share your latest work, especially compared to social media, it’s not great for a portfolio. A portfolio should be enough shots to let someone fully understand your work, but not so many that you’ve included weak, irrelevant shots.

In fact, my favorite approach is to have a single, overarching portfolio covering your major focus, then create some mini-portfolios with more works or alternate genres if necessary. For a landscape photographer, this might look like having a main landscape gallery to highlight your absolute best shots, then a few additional but separate galleries with a focus on astrophotography, panoramas, or wildlife shots. This way you can reference a single portfolio when necessary, while still providing viewers an opportunity to dig deeper into your work.

As a rough rule of thumb, I’d keep the main portfolio to 20 images or fewer. The exact number will depend on where you’re at in your photographic journey – someone just getting started might have 5 shots they’re really proud of, while a photographer with 20 years of experience might find it tough to keep it to 50 images. Even if you’re having to choose from dozens of strong images, however, I still think having a specific focus makes for a stronger portfolio. 

One challenge you might face is separating your emotions from the actual quality of the shot. I know that in my portfolio, there are a few images that aren’t as armstrong as others, but they’re the product of a lot of effort on my part. All that planning, hiking, post-processing, and more has made me very attached to the photo, even if I know it’s not my absolute best shot. One thing that can help with this is to create a “short-list” of the shots you’d consider including, then get advice from your target audience. Ask friends, other photographers, or family members. Each can bring their own viewpoint to a portfolio review, and it might be significantly different than your own.

What Tools to Use When Actually Curating

My favorite tool for curating my shots is actually the piece of photo software I spend the most time in. Lightroom Classic, with its huge array of organization tools, is the perfect option for curating. Depending on how you already use Lightroom, you can curate via a couple of different methods. I have all of my completed photos marked with pick flags and make use of collections for organization purposes.

I like to use these collections for a couple of reasons. The first is that I can easily change my mind, adding and removing images without having to worry about it affecting my overall catalog. Secondly, using a collection lets you quickly preview how images flow together – viewing the collection as a grid can be a quick way to preview how a grid view webpage would look, letting you change the order of images and spot any potential problems before export.

The last big advantage of Lightroom is the ability to tweak export settings. While we’ll discuss export settings and technical considerations more in the next section, Lightroom’s export panel makes it easy to access all of the relevant settings in one spot, as well as save them as a preset. Being able to quickly export a revised copy of an image, or an entirely new image that you’re excited to add to your portfolio is very convenient.

If you aren’t already using Lightroom, you don’t need to start just to create a portfolio. You can do many of the same things with a combination of Adobe Bridge and Photoshop, or with a myriad of other software tools. For Photoshop, one of the best options is the Save for Web option. This provides one-click access to color space, resizing, and file format options, making it a great substitute for Lightroom’s export dialog.

Lastly, if you’re looking for an open-source option, consider checking out Darktable. This open-source piece of software helps you organize your shots in a database similar to Lightroom, making it a great option to try when you’re unsure if you’ll like the catalog model.

Technical Considerations

Once you’ve got your selected photos gathered up, there’s still a number of technical considerations to make sure they look their best. Depending on how you shoot, you may be starting with raw, TIFF, PSD, or JPEG files, or even a mix of those. From there, you’ll probably want to end up with a sRGB color space JPEG file. Both of those parts are important. The first choice, of color space, is pretty simple. For web use, sRGB is the best choice. While some devices have started supporting a broader color gamut, the majority of devices will still prefer sRGB, and compatibility is a key consideration when creating your portfolio. 

Compatibility and convenience also play a role in the choice of file format. JPEG images are almost universally compatible with devices, while also offering a good-enough level of compression. Depending on how you’re sharing your portfolio, you may be able to use some newer formats like WEBP, but that’ll be far rarer than just going with JPEG. On the topic of compression, saving at around 80% is “perceptually lossless”, but may still result in overly-large file sizes for web use. You can use a utility like JPEGMini to shrink file sizes even further.

Another consideration that shares a lot with compression is image size. Both size and compression dictate how long it’ll take a user to download your images – this not only directly impacts user experience but also can affect your SEO and website ranking, as Google penalizes sites that take too long to download images. 

Consider your typical viewer: are they going to be using a 4K display or a phone? A bigger, higher-resolution display has only grown more common over the last few years, with even phones sporting FullHD and higher displays. As a result, most of the old advice regarding web-sizes has grown stale. Uploading an image that’s only 400 pixels long on an edge will look bad on most modern devices when featured as the main element on a page. Instead, consider something like 1500 pixels, or even better, upload a high-resolution image and use a service that can dynamically serve smaller images to your website’s users – this way everyone gets an appropriate size image.

Larger images can make a greater impact on your viewers but aren’t without their downsides. Besides the already mentioned challenges with download speed, larger sizes can also make it easier for your images to be stolen and reused elsewhere. Every photographer will approach this challenge differently, but I personally view it as a no-win situation. Adding small watermarks aren’t very effective, as they can be removed in seconds with Photoshop, leaving a seamless result. Large watermarks are distracting and can leave your viewer with a poor impression of the work itself.

Fortunately, there are a few small measures you can take. Many content management systems allow you to disable the right-click feature – while this can be easily circumvented via a screenshot, it’s a quick and easy way to cut down on the most basic image theft.

In fact, NextGEN Pro (which comes with The Photocrati Theme) offers this feature.

A more effective, but more complicated, the measure is to use a service like Pixsy. When you upload your images to Pixsy, the service will search the internet for any uses of your image, then alert you. If these are unlicensed or undesirable uses, you can have Pixsy automatically take action on your behalf.

One final consideration when preparing your photos is making any tweaks to brightness and contrast. As a photographer, you’ve probably worked hard to set up your monitor with a neutral brightness and color balance – most of your viewers won’t have taken the same measures. This can result in your images appearing dull or too dark on their devices. To fight this, you might consider adding a slight bump in exposure, contrast, or saturation when necessary. A quick way to check this is to seek out the worst display you have access to, and check your images on it. If they look good on that 19 inch Dell LCD from 2008, they should look good everywhere! Just like before, this is also going to be impacted by who your audience is – if you’re shooting for a high-end audience, consider checking on an iPhone or Macbook instead.

Conclusion

Curating a portfolio can be a difficult, but immensely rewarding task. Sorting through all your images is never easy, but when using a tool like Lightroom, Adobe Bridge, or Darktable, things should go a bit faster.

Once you’ve got your images in mind, consider creating a website to share them – Photocrati offers dozens of starting designs, responsive displays, built-in galleries perfect for portfolios, and ecommerce support, all in one WordPress theme.

I hope you’ll embrace the challenge of curating the perfect landscape photography portfolio! For more information on building a winning website and photography portfolio, make sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for more updates!