Hi, I'm Tony Northrup and for chapter one of my book Stunning
Digital Photography, I'd like to talk to you about making your own
online portfolio. Now it's not something just for pros either, everybody needs to have a
portfolio because
this is key to tracking your progress and improvement
as a photographer. A portfolio is how you show your best
work to the world but its also how you keep track of your best work
for yourself and that's really important. Whether you're an
amateur or a professional photographer because
like all artists, photographers aren't competing against each other,
I certainly would want to take on Ansel Adams, right? We compete against ourselves.
We're constantly trying to take a better picture than we took
yesterday and how do you know if you don't keep track of what your best work
is.
So many times when I meet a new Photographer, they sent me to their
Facebook or their Flickr or even worse like their Twitter or Tumblr.
And that's fine, that shows me there recent work,
but sometimes your recent work isn't your best work, right? What if you're a wildlife
photographer and you have a couple of rough days chasing down birds, and all you have are
some seagulls and sparrows, well I might not dig through enough of your work to find
those beautiful bald eagle pictures
And of course if you're a professional photographer or you want
to be a professional photographer, even if you just wanna sell prints, or give
that a shot
portfolios are how you do that. That's the website you set up where everybody
can go see your work and be super impressed and want to hire you
Or browse through your pictures and find something that they wanna buy a copy of.
For that reason pros absolutely need a portfolio site but
like I said I feel like all even moderately serious
amateurs need one too because it's such a critical part of becoming a better
photographer.
For a long time setting up an online portfolio has been kind of a challenge like
either it ended up looking kind of
ugly or you had to have a good knowledge of HTML and CSS
Well I found a new website, Squarespace, that makes this
much much much much easier and I recently moved my own portfolio over
from my old
hosting provider to Squarespace and I've been
really happy with them. So I'll walk you through
my process of setting my portfolio so you can see just how straightforward it is.
First I'll visit Squarespace.com/tony to get that 10 percent
discount. I'll click get started in the middle here
They have a variety of templates here to choose from
and you can see they offer templates for more than just portfolio websites;
stores, restaurants. I'm just interested in portfolio so I'll narrow it
down and then we can browse through the different templates and get an idea of
the type of style that we like.
And don't worry, if you change your mind you can always switch it later.
So for me I think I like this Wexly one here you can preview it by clicking the
view button
and get a live preview and this gives you an idea of what it's going to look
like
This is nice because it shows thumbnails right away, you can scroll through quickly
and click something to get a larger preview:
and it allows you to quickly jump through so, I like that design a lot
and if you scroll down a little bit you can see all these different portfolios
made with that same design, you can see how
other people are using it. And you can see even within a given design
you have a lot of different options for how it's going to be laid out. So let's browse through a
couple of the other ones
Forte here starts with that one single
fullscreen image, it doesn't give you that kind of
immediate gratification of browsing through the pictures but
it would engage somebody more as you can see the different design leads to a very
different style
When you choosing your site's template you should pick something that
vibes with your style of photography. So if you're a
family portrait photographer pick something nice and friendly
And if you're a fashion or commercial photographer, pick something
sleek and modern. Whichever style you use I want you to
grab your cell phone, your smartphone and grab the smartphone of everybody around you
and make sure that the site loads and displays okay because
Mobile Compatibility is an absolute
must. You can see the Flatiron site provides kinda the best of both worlds
fullscreen immersive image with the ability to browse thumbnails for the
impatient. I think Flatiron matches my style pretty well. So I'm going to click create
a site like this
and here you just log in providing your name and email
So here we are at the
Content Manager page, and this is where you're going to configure your site
and add pictures to it. And as you can see they don't leave you without help at any point
there are little wizard
dialogues that pop up and tell you exactly what you're doing and where you
are
Each template starts with a set of example pages, but you have complete control of it
so
I'm gonna choose make a page like this and customize it myself
and we can see within the portfolio this particular template has multiple
subfolders
So course we don't want this photographers pictures on there, though they're lovely
So I'll choose "make a page like this" and add my own and I think I'll start with
commercial
Now to add my pictures I'll just click the "Add items" button here
and you see I can just browse my thumbnails so I'll pick some of my commercial pictures.
Now I'll create a second gallery
for my wildlife shots and I'll add some of those pictures in
I can already tell I'm going to
have way too many wildlife shots and I'm going to have to do some weeding.
Now click "view gallery" to see how everything is looking so far
I can already see one challenge is that the
photos are sized so that they're scaled from left to right
and that can cause parts of the picture to be
cut off. Thats one of the challenges that you deal with with these full screen
immersive
interfaces. Now as you can see I squeeze the window in from the left here
the template automatically resizes it and now that the window
isn't as wide its scaling it from top to bottom.
I can change that by selecting the options down here, right now it says
full bleed, and maybe I'll just go for center and I'll click "save"
to save it. So now we can see
the pictures are no longer being cut off but they are also no longer
fullscreen, that's a choice that you have to make
regardless of how you set up the site because people have different shaped windows
people will be browsing this on their
iPhone and tablets and smaller screens and wide screens.
If you decide to stretch rather than center your pictures
go into the Squarespace interface and drag that little circle around to put it over the
focal point
of the picture. This will allow Squarespace to better center it
and better decide what parts of the picture need to be cropped for the best
effect. As I click the mobile app's link here, you'll see an interesting
feature of squarespace which is the ability to control everything from a
mobile device
This also gives you the really powerful ability to
view your portfolio from your iPhone or iPad
Now all these colors that you see are completely configurable
as well as the fonts and just about every other
element of it. So as you can see this right now has a white background
maybe I wanna go a little more dramatic, I can pull this down and go black
Ooh, stark and modern. Not too hard, right?
If you want to try Squarespace out on your own use this
URL: go to Squarespace.com/tony
and that gives you your first month free and 10 percent
off of that. You don't even need to put in a credit card for the first month, so even if you
just wanna play around
and set up a site just to see how your pictures might look
you can do that and they won't possibly charge you a penny cuz they won't have your
credit card number, right? It's pretty easy to do
So let's talk a little bit more about how to pick your pictures.
It is so hard to narrow down your body of work to 10 or 15 pictures and
I know this because I see a lot of people's portfolios and they have like 50,
100 pictures in there and nobody has the patience for that anymore. Maybe back in
like the fifties when people didn't have television and the Internet
they'd sit there and they'd flip through page after page of photos
but nowadays you're lucky to get people to look at five or ten pictures so
you want to, say, put 15 pictures in your portfolio?
Don't go over that, I tell people ten because
I know they're not going to be able to narrow it down that far but I do not want to
see twenty
pictures, at least in one category, on your portfolio. That's
too many and people won't get through them. So as you're going to your portfolio
what I like to do is use Lightroom
and I flip through and I rate pictures from one to five stars
and I reserve 5 stars for only my very best work
then I can filter the view to see just my
five star pictures and at that point I start to narrow it down
further. I pick at most one picture from
any given set. I don't wanna see two pictures taken
on the same day. Forget it! You need as much diversity in your portfolio as
possible. If you have two pictures which are similar in
any way you need to pick the absolute best one
Even though I know it's going to be painful. If you're a wildlife photographer that means
you put in one picture
of any given species, tops. If you're a landscape photographer that means
putting in one picture of any given location just pick your best one
The sequence of your pictures in your portfolio is very important
but I can make it easy for you. Your first picture should be your best
picture
Your second best picture, make it the last picture in the sequence.
The first picture needs to grab somebody but as they progress through their gonna
linger on the last picture because that's when the slideshow
stops. So you don't want to put it from best to worst or they'll be lingering on your worst
picture
For everything in between, as much variety
as possible. Besides varying subjects, it is a great idea to vary processing styles too.
So put in some natural color pictures in there put in some kinda
over processed HDR-style photos if you like that stuff
mix in some black and white, maybe some sepia. Especially if you're a portrait
photographer and looking to attract some clients
you'll want just at least one picture in there that's gonna catch
everybody's eye and everybody has a little bit different sense of style.
So there are a lot of people out there who like this kinda modern Instagram style
heavily filtered picture and you should have at least one of those in your
portfolio
if you're willing to do that. Just so that people know 'hey I like this type of
picture this guy does this type of picture'
Generally, in your portfolio you want to use horizontal pictures rather than
vertical pictures because most people, right now, will be consuming your
portfolio on a
PC with the horizontal monitor, so they'll just
look better. There are some pages that everybody needs on your portfolio no
matter
who you are. Of course you'll need a photo page and you might have multiple
different pages if you want to show multiple different categories of
photos. You should also have an "About" page that says a little bit about you
if you're a professional you also want a
contact page that tells people where they can go and how they can get in
touch with you
In fact, even for amateurs it's a great idea to have a contact page because
I'll find that a lot of people will stumble across your pictures and they might want
to buy or use one of the pictures.
If you're a pro you really need to put up a pricing page. A lot of people avoid this
because they don't like to talk about money
or they don't wanna put a price that's too high or too low
so they want people to call them so they'll negotiate, but people don't do that
They'll look for prices and if they don't final them they move on to the next guy.
So put down some kind of pricing or you're risking
losing eighty percent of potential customers.
One of the most important part of your portfolio is the domain name, and this
is the place where a lot of people mess stuff up.
Some people have a really long names and they make their domain name,
I don't know, "JonathanWeissmullerPhotography.com"
And guess what, I'm sorry Jonathan Weissmuller, if you're out there nobody knows how to
spell Weissmuller
and if you have one whose names where you're always spelling at the people on
the phone
and you're having to repeat yourself over and over again, then it doesn't make a good
domain name.
You should choose something simpler, something that you can relate to and
I dunno,
"Babbling Brook Photography" or "Waterford
Portraits.com" If you're a professional
fine arts or stock photographer, if you want to be able to sell you the digital
downloads or prints,
you'll want a separate store on your site.
I went ahead and set one up on my own Squarespace site and it works really
well
And you know what, it it's not that hard. It used to be setting up e-commerce required
like
a team of people, but I really did it in like half an hour despite dragging and
dropping some stuff in and
figuring out the prices. Once you set up your portfolio, you're not completely done.
Of course the fun part is taking a picture that belongs in your portfolio
Revisiting your portfolio, getting rid of the worst picture and putting in your
new
best picture. But you also need the kinda revisit it on a regular basis to make
sure, 1) that the
designe holds up, because design styles
change on a regular basis. If you're a portrait photographer you should make sure that
you know the people in your portrait still have modern looking clothes.
You know I'm people with like mullets and acid washed jeans in there anymore
it's going to make a whole portfolio look
old. But you'll want, on a regular basis, to update to the latest
templates too, to insure that your website remains compatible with
all the different new browsers and all the different mobile devices.
That's pretty easy to do with Squarespace it's not so easy with some other
portfolio providers.
I think the best place to get a portfolio is Squarespace.com/Tony
Visit that exact URL and you'll get 30 days free and then ten percent of
for the
rest of your subscription if you decide to subscribe, it doesn't cost
you anything.
If you liked this video check out the rest my book, Stunning
Digital Photography. This is just part of
chapter one and I have a ton of
videos in there. Most of which you won't see anywhere
else. You can also see just free videos without paying anything by
clicking that subscribe button down below and give me a like if you don't mind.
If you have any questions, of course you can contact me by posting a comment
down below on the page or sending an email to tony@northrup.org.
Thanks