September 22, 2008

So you want to show your portfolio...

My advice to photographers who want to show off their work is simple:

1. Put your work up on the web. Photographers who don't promote their work online risk being completely ignored.

2. Showcase either tightly edited portfolios or stream work as you make it. If you do both keep the stream clearly separate from the portfolio.

3. Unless you are a photojournalist primarily selling images for web consumption, put up big images. Don't worry about people stealing your images. Nobody is going to make a decent print from something you post online. Look at web images as promotion. Also don't watermark you images. Yes, some of your pictures will float around unattributed, but it's better than looking like a douchebag. Photoshop allows you to include authorship info that will travel with your image, just choose File Info from the File menu.

4. Don't use flash (if you use flash people can't link to your images, and they can't propagate around the web. You WANT your images to travel).

5. Don't worry too much about fancy design. People just want to be able to see your images and to quickly navigate from one to the next.

6. Tell stories.

If you know nothing about how to make your own website use one of these excellent sites to showcase your work:

http://arlosites.com/
http://www.behance.net
http://cargocollective.com
http://www.krop.com/creativedatabase
http://www.carbonmade.com
http://www.flickr.com

If you know a tiny bit about the web, use a cms, like tumblr, movable type, or wordpress. Really good gallery themes exist for all of them. Here's a simple tumblr theme that lets you upload very large images that scale to the size of the window.

I look forward to seeing your best stuff.

Updated 10/2009 with some new sites.

posted at 10:46 PM by raul

Filed under: photographic services

TAGS: photography portfolio sites (1) tumblr theme (1)