How to Build a Photo Portfolio
Every portfolio of a thousand photos starts with a single frame…!
My landing page
If you want to impress people as a photographer, show them fewer photos! If people see one or two stunning images, they’ll probably say, “Wow!”, but if there are too many, it’s more likely to be “Meh…” The key to building a successful portfolio is showing only your very best work—ie ‘fake it ‘til you make it!’
I’m not the world’s greatest expert on sales and marketing, but it’s very important to be able to take people quickly and easily through your greatest hits. It doesn’t matter if it’s on your smartphone or your website. The important point is that when you tell someone you’re a wildlife photographer, you need to be able to back it up!
So where do you start…?
Selection
Bear Gills
The first step in building a portfolio is to choose your best images (and videos, if necessary). If you’re serious about your photography, you’ve probably taken tens of thousands of images over the years, so where do you begin?
Well, it’s important to rate your images as you go along. If you haven’t ever done that, now’s the time to start! If you use a program like Lightroom, it’s very easy. All you need to do is select a photo in grid view and press any of the numbers 1-5 on the keyboard to give it a matching star rating.
When I’m on safari, I do it myself after every game drive. Once I’ve uploaded the day’s pictures to my laptop, I’ll rate them all. You can pick any numbering system you like, but I use my ratings to help me know what to do with my photos:
One star means it’s a shot of people, food, accommodation or any other non-wildlife subject that’s only good enough for Facebook (unless it’s for a client!).
Two stars means it’s one of my best non-wildlife shots.
Three stars means it’s good enough to send to one of my stock agencies to try and sell.
Four stars means it’s one of my favourite sellable shots.
Five stars means it’s one of my Top 100 of all time.
Rating is clearly a very subjective process, and it’s important to go through your photos again to check your scores and ‘deduplicate’ your favourites. Agencies don’t like near-duplicates, and people like variety, so you don’t want to show them to your friends and family or the general public.
For example, if you find a good shot of an elephant first time round, you might give it three stars, but what if there’s an even better one in the same burst? If you review your collection a second time, you can compare the two, keeping the better one and removing your rating from the other.
Organisation
Dustbuster
One obvious question to think about is how many images to choose for your portfolio. As I say, less is more, but how many is too many—or too few?
I’ve been doing this a while now, and I’ve found that it helps to create different collections to show people, depending on their level of interest. When I tell people I’m a wildlife photographer and show them pictures on my iPhone, it’s often hard to tell how they’ll react. They might spend 20 minutes looking at every single one, or they might just look at the first one and hand me back my phone!
That’s why I keep different galleries on my phone, laptop and website. I have my Top 100 in colour and black and white, but I also have a narrower portfolio of the 36 photos that appear online. That’s what I usually start with, and I can always show more if I need to.
I have four main galleries on the Prints page of my website, organised by the kind of emotion they’re intended to evoke:
In addition, I publish collections of my most recent trips, plus three themed galleries of Predators, Prey and Birds. The idea is to try and help people find the print they’re looking for, but they can obviously still browse through the galleries even if they’re not interested in buying anything.
The number of images you select for your portfolio doesn’t have to be set in stone. When people complain to me that they don’t have enough really good photos, I tell them to start with one. If you have any hope of being taken seriously as a wildlife photographer, you must have at least one great photo!
After that, you can gradually add more. It’s up to you how high you set the bar, but there’s an obvious trade-off between quality and quantity. Personally, I’d show only the photos you’re really happy with. Your portfolio is supposed to be your shop window, so you only want your most eye-catching images on display.
Website
My blog page
The obvious place to publish your portfolio is on your website—but what if you don’t have one or can’t afford one? Don’t worry. It’s easy to set up a basic site, and you might even be able to do it for free. If you’re not confident enough to do it yourself, then you can always hire someone to help—but it’s not that hard.
Development
I started out after university as a computer programmer, and I’m reasonably handy with a laptop, but there are plenty of cheap and user-friendly sites out there these days that make it easy to drag and drop your way to a decent website.
Strikingly and The Free Website Guys offer free development, and WordPress is a popular tool for people who want to create their own websites. If you want to be able to sell prints, courses, books or other merchandise at some stage, you might want to be a bit more for a Squarespace subscription.
Squarespace is quite easy to use (with a little practice!), and it has a sophisticated commerce offering that takes most of the hassle out of selling either digital or physical products. It’s what I use for my website, and there’s not much it can’t do.
My only slight bugbear is in the name itself: ‘Square Space’. The whole idea is that it works best if your photos are square—but I don’t like square photos! That means it’s hard to format a gallery that has a mixture of portrait and landscape images.
In the end, I had to tag all my vertical images with the word ‘portrait’ and use a piece of custom CSS code that I found online. If you want to do the same, you can find all the instructions here.
Functionality
"Ah, grasshopper..."
One of the most important questions you have to ask yourself is, “What do I want people to be able to do on my website?” If you just want a page or two of galleries to showcase your work, that needs a fairly straightforward design that you can probably manage yourself using Strikingly or WordPress.
However, if you want to commercialise your work, you might need to choose Squarespace or a similar platform with built-in features allowing you to accept orders and payment by debit or credit card and deliver digital products, such as wallpapers, JPEGs, ebooks or courses. If you’re selling prints and other physical products, you might want some way of tracking orders and fulfillment.
There are lots of ways to make money out of photography, so you just need to decide which doors you’re going to open. The great thing about a website you can modify yourself is that you can add or delete pages at will. I now have pages selling Prints, Books, Workshops, Courses and Lessons, but I’ve also experimented (unsuccessfully!) with wallpaper and podcasts.
Pricing
Eddie the Penguin
Pricing your work is always hard, but it helps if you decide what kind of ‘brand’ you want to offer. Do you want to be a low-cost provider or an expensive niche photographer? Cheap prints will probably sell well, but will you actually make any money out of them? Expensive prints might bring in hundreds or even thousands of pounds each, but how many can you sell?
When I asked wildlife photographer Andy Skillen how much to charge for my prints, he suggested finding out the commercial rate for the size of print I wanted and then multiplying it by 2.5. He said that would give me enough profit on every sale to be able to replace the stock and still have enough left over to provide a decent salary.
I generally recommend trying to find a high-end niche where you can charge premium prices, but it’s entirely up to you. If you use a platform like Squarespace, it’s very easy to experiment with your pricing by holding sales or offering discount codes. All you need to do is change the price, and a ‘SALE’ sticker is automatically placed next to it.
Verdict
This is only a quick run-through of the kind of decisions you need to make when creating a portfolio. It might seem a little intimidating, but it can easily be broken down into different stages, and there’s nothing that requires a vast budget to achieve.
Having a portfolio has clear advantages, whether it’s just a folder full of pictures on your smartphone or an all-singing, all-dancing website selling every one of your available products. It puts you on the map as a photographer and acts as a useful anchoring point for your brand.
Once you have a website, it’s easy to add the link to your email signature, put it on business cards and paste it into any online communication you have with friends, family or the general public. It’s also a great way to commercialise your work. The dream is obviously ‘making money while you sleep’, and it’s more than possible once you get going.
If you need any help or advice building or improving your website, please let me know. I’m always happy to help. Good luck!
If you’d like to order a framed print of one of my wildlife photographs, please visit the Prints page.
If you’d like to book a lesson or order an online photography course, please visit my Lessons and Courses pages.
