How to Make a Photography Portfolio (Bonus: 9 best practices)

In a world overflowing with visual content, a photographer’s ability to stand out and make a lasting impression is more crucial than ever. Creating a photography portfolio becomes essential to showcasing your talent and growing your audience.

Whether you are an aspiring photographer looking to break into the industry or a seasoned pro seeking to expand your reach, a well-crafted photography portfolio is your gateway to success.

A photography portfolio can help you land more clients and take your photography business to the next level. But creating a photography portfolio that genuinely shines isn’t just about tossing together your best snapshots; it’s an art form.

This blog will unlock the secrets of creating a perfect photography portfolio website and share tips and examples to make your portfolio stand out. So, how to make a photography portfolio?

Decoding photography portfolio

A photography portfolio is simply a collection of photographs. Professional photographers use it to attract potential clients, while a photography hobbyist only creates a personal portfolio for friends and family.

Professional photographers used to showcase their work in printed portfolios. Now, they have switched to digital portfolios and photography websites accessible to everyone online.

A good website builder can help you easily create an online photography portfolio. Some portfolio websites may even display prints that interested clients can buy directly from their website or via an e-commerce partner. See photography portfolio examples.

Why is a photography portfolio significant?

A photography portfolio is beneficial for professional photographers for the following reasons:

• Showcase your work: A photography portfolio website will have a collection of your best work, showcasing your talent, style, and creativity. It is the first point of contact for a potential client, more often than not. And why not? It’s your entire brand on display!
• Prove your credibility: A well-curated photo portfolio website helps you prove your credibility and professionalism. It allows you to exhibit your experience, aesthetics, and expertise.
• Engage and attract clients: It can also help engage and attract potential clients. You showcase the proof of your capabilities to prospective clients, who can preview your work and decide if it aligns with their requirements and vision.
• Show your competitive advantage: You need to stand out from the competition. And having a portfolio can help photographers with that. It allows you to show your uniqueness, display high-quality work that demonstrates a clear edge over competitors, and attract more clients.
• Track your progress: Portfolio websites allow you to track your progress and measure your growth over time by acting as a journal to document your projects. It shows you how you have evolved as a photographer by curating a set of your best work.

Should you make a digital or physical photography portfolio?

Digital Photography Portfolio	Physical Photography Portfolio
Easy to create and share	Tangibility
Handles high volume	First impression with beautiful prints
Reach wider audience	Have control over the viewing experience
For online applications and brand promotion	For in-person meetings

Digital photography portfolios are the new normal as they are easy to share and can withstand a high volume of work online. DIY website builders like Pixpa help you easily create an interactive presentation without having coding or design expertise. Even the Instagram feed can be leveraged as your portfolio in a pinch!

In contrast, physical portfolios offer a tangible product that potential clients can keep and refer to. It enables you to make an impression with design elements such as print finish, paper stock, and special touches like embossing.

Physical portfolios also allow you to control the viewing experience, instead of art directors and gallery owners having to view your work on uncalibrated monitors.

Keeping physical and digital portfolios ready is a good practice. The digital portfolio can be utilized for online applications, interviews, and brand promotion. It helps you exhibit your best work and allows visitors to better understand your style.

A physical portfolio can come in handy for in-person meetings, galleries, shows, and other events that require you to leave a lasting impression in the minds of potential clients.

How to make a photography portfolio?

Identify the Goals and Target Audience

Photographers should figure out why they want to make photography portfolios. For instance, you can build a general portfolio or aim for a specific job. Having a goal-driven mindset can help build the portfolio content and style.

The following are key aspects to consider while setting your goals:

• Audience: Consider what sort of prospective clients or visitors you want to reach, for example, companies, individuals, or publications.
• Strengths: Start asking relevant questions yourself, such as whether you are better at nature or at Photoshop retouching.
• Target: Set a goal you want to achieve, such as branching out into another type of photography and attracting more high-level clients.
• Personal brand: Your positioning and messaging should be spot on. Your personality should reflect the tone of your voice and overall portfolio style, such as professional and minimalist or quirky and colorful.

Image source: Foregroundweb

Selecting and securing a domain is a good practice at this nascent stage. Your digital presence begins with a domain name. Choose one that fits the bill, i.e., resonates with your brand and makes it easy for potential clients to find you.

You can use your name or a variation for a professional touch. Try including keywords that are related to your photography niche to enhance discoverability.

Pixpa users opting for its annual or 2-year subscription plans, excluding the basic plan, get a free one-year domain registration through hover.com.

Choose a Niche

Source: Foregroundweb

Selecting a niche allows you to be more focused and build expertise. For example:

• Commercial photography: This kind of photography can include, for example, architectural photography for the real estate sector, fashion photography for clothing brands, and food photography for hotels and restaurants.
• Travel photography: This can include landscape, wildlife, or astrophotography.
• Portrait photography: This can comprise graduation shoots, family portraits, and headshots for wannabe actors and models.
• Event photography: Such photographers are most commonly hired for parties, corporate events, and concerts and deal with low lighting and a lot of motion.
• Sports photography: This calls for expensive equipment like a heavy lens that can zoom in on specific sports actions and shoot at rapid shutter speeds.
• Fine art photography: This pertains to the artistic appearance of a piece or subject, which is most commonly attained with the help of editing software to make particular effects. Usually, such artworks are sold to hotels, restaurants, or individuals to hang in their space.
• Photojournalism: It involves a documentary-style approach and tells a story that we commonly see on television news.

Your goals, target audience, personality, and interests matter when zeroing in on your niche. For example, if you are introverted and don't like crowds, you should consider portrait photography instead of event photography.

You should also envision the type of photography clients you would ideally relish working with, such as large companies, couples, or models.

Include your Best Photographs

Once the goals are set and the niche is defined, create one or multiple galleries, one for each category of work, such as weddings, travel, portrait photography, etc. Now that you have decided which collections of works you want to exhibit on your photography website, move on to including the best photographs you have.

Remember that your website isn’t the same as your Instagram account. You shouldn’t publish every single photo you have for customer engagement. Instead, your professional photographer's website is supposed to illustrate only the best of the lot. The most representative pieces from each category should be displayed.

Go for quality over quantity. Choose a maximum of 20 to 30 pictures per gallery. It’s a good practice to build curiosity amongst your audience and make them want more rather than bombarding them with everything.

For example, if you explore Daniel Adebiyi's Pixpa-powered photography portfolio website, the ‘weddings’ section displays some of his best photos as a wedding photographer. This gives viewers a fair idea of his style of capturing wedding photos.

Moreover, Pixpa users reap the benefits of its default image quality setting of 75% for JPEG images. This setting applies to images uploaded after the adjustment. This helps in optimizing image quality for faster website loading speeds.

Find the Right Website Builder

You need to select a photographer portfolio website builder that allows you to imbibe your design aesthetic and brand identity through templates. Templates that truly represent you and your work in the best way possible.

Leveraging a portfolio builder specializing in online photography portfolios will streamline your experience, especially when you do not have experience creating an online portfolio.

You need not worry about exorbitant prices that you might need to build your photography portfolio. With prices that fit your budget, you should be able to build a beautiful, fully customizable photo portfolio site. Additionally, take the time to learn about building a portfolio website in your spare time to enhance your skills in your spare time and ensure your portfolio reflects your best work.

Want the best site for your photography portfolio? Here are some considerations to consider while choosing the best photography portfolio website builder:

• You should be able to build your online photography portfolio without any coding experience.
• It should provide plenty of beautiful photography website templates to choose from. You should be able to customize it and switch to a different one even after the site is live.
• There should be a provision for creating a blog page to share your photos, ideas, and updates with your audience.
• The website builder should also provide client galleries to help clients easily view, proof, purchase, and download photos.
• You should be able to build an online store and start selling in minutes quickly.
• You should also get e-commerce galleries to efficiently sell your prints, canvases, gallery wraps, etc.
• To grow your business, you need integrated SEO tools and marketing tools.
• You should be able to extend your site’s capabilities by integrating third-party apps.
• You should have access to customer support 24/7 whenever you get into trouble.
• Finally, a free trial should be available to build a free portfolio website. You want to pick a photography portfolio builder that gives you a test period to try and determine if it fits your photography business.

Create your layout

Now, focus on the layout, i.e., the visual structure of your portfolio. You should have your best images to be at the center so that you grab the much-needed attention they deserve.

The first way to do this is by choosing the right website colors with minimal hues. Try using a black (dark) or white (clean) background so that your photos stand out.

Then, think of the kind of display you want to use. It should fit the dominant format of your photos: long scrolling if you click a lot of vertical or portrait photos and grids for landscape or horizontal ones. Simply put, you need flexibility with the gallery layout to decide how you want to display your images, videos, and text slides on your website.

Choose the right template

Professionally-designed photography website templates would help you create a beautiful portfolio in no time. Since they are created to fulfill the needs of specific photography genres, they already comprise most of the sections and tools you require.

Even if you plan to build a photography portfolio website from scratch, browsing through the best photography website templates is a good practice for seeking inspiration. Explore Pixpa templates.

Add the right pages

Let’s focus on the architecture of the photography website, i.e., the pages you want to include and where they will be placed. As a photographer, you do not need too many pages. Instead, focus on these must-haves:

Homepage

This is where you present yourself and what you do to the visitors. Your homepage should have visuals as the main feature and written content to provide visitors with a narrative.

For example, if you display an image of a beautiful landscape or a vintage car, you should still use words to clarify that this is a website for travel photography and not that of a travel agency or blogger. For example, check out this homepage of travel photographer Robert Dixie Trawick’s portfolio, built using Pixpa.

Ensure that your photography logo, name, and expertise are large and clear on your homepage. This will help visitors know who you are, what you do, and where you are.

Also, include a navigation menu to help your audience quickly jump from one page to another and find the content they want. Based on your website’s style, you can determine if you can put a navigation bar at the header or simply use a collapsed hamburger menu to allow more room for visual content.

Your homepage is the first page visitors see, and Pixpa gives you all the tools to build one quickly without any code. When clicked, the logo/site title redirects to the page you choose. You can choose the homepage or specify any external/internal page, contact number, or email. Here is your guide to building a homepage with Pixpa.

About Me page

This is where people discover who you are. To make things more intimate, prefer using first-person over the third, and readers will be more interested in reaching out to you.

Connect with prospective clients by sharing a story on your About Me page, as they will be able to familiarize themselves with your brand identity.

It’s a good practice to include who you are, your working history, your values and principles, the services you offer, and the working process. Look at Artem Khazov’s photography portfolio, built using Pixpa.

Client gallery

Your potential clients feel more confident seeing your work for previous clients. So, adding and displaying these projects on your photography website is essential.

Pixpa’s client galleries help you showcase your work with beautiful online galleries that match your brand identity. Your clients can view, proof, purchase, and download photos easily. Learn more.

Contact page

Provide basic contact information like name, email address, and phone number to make it easy for potential clients to reach you. You can add these details to the footer, but creating a dedicated contact page lets visitors access this information easily.

Add a contact section to a page or simply create a contact page directly using Pixpa’s no-code website builder. It can include a text block, a contact form, and a location map. Learn more.

Notable mentions:

• Blog: Use a blog page to share your thoughts and opinions about the projects you have worked on, photography techniques, and relevant news. This can both build a loyal community and improve your search engine rankings.
• Online store: Make money from your photography website. Pixpa lets you build an online store without any coding experience and enables you to give it the same visual look and feel as the rest of your website.
• Testimonials: Show some positive reviews given by your clients and let the customer testimonials do the talking for you.
• Pricing: Your potential clients naturally search for a pricing page. A pricing page packed with information increases user confidence and conversions.

Connect to your social channels

Let your visitors share your content on Instagram and other social media channels. After all, there are 4.8 billion social media users worldwide. Social media is the easiest and cheapest way to get your name out there and to get new customers.

You can add the social section in Pixpa to any of your pages and show your Instagram feed or social icons. Note that these icons will be linked to the social media profiles you have specified in the social media links. It is most frequently added to the pre-footer.

For example, Rich Davenport’s Pixpa-powered portrait photography portfolio includes an Instagram icon. Instagram is a perfect social media platform to showcase your best portrait photographs to your followers, and Rich does precisely that.

Let’s look at another example where Shiny Ghosh includes LinkedIn and Behance icons instead of the likes of Instagram or Facebook on her Pixpa-powered portfolio. Shiny is a marketing professional specializing in visual content creation, graphic design, social media marketing, and influencer marketing. So, LinkedIn and Behance have become an automatic choice for sharing their work with their followers.

Grow your audience

It’s a known fact that photographers are much more inclined to use visual than textual forms. It comes in handy in seizing the moment for a photo. It is rather challenging for them to work on their website’s SEO.

Search engines cannot see images; they can only read words. You must leverage your keyboard skills to be found online and bring more traffic to your website.

You can use the built-in marketing tools of Pixpa to grow your business:

• SEO Manager: Helps you write relevant page titles, descriptions, and relevant keywords for your website.
• Marketing Popups: This helps you create popups when people visit your website. Use it to promote new products or features, offer discounts, launch new whitepapers, and more.
• Announcement Bar: Use these eye-batching top bars to grab attention, drive more signups, and promote offers.
• Mobile Action Bar: Add CTAs to improve conversions.
• WhatsApp Widget: Respond and resolve issues faster.
• Email Lists: Create email lists for all the email entries on the site.
• App integration: Achieve more by integrating popular apps into the website.
• Multilingual website: Expand your market reach with multi-language websites.
• Smart embeds: Create interactive video experiences by embedding Vimeo and YouTube videos.

Read about Pixpa’s SEO capabilities and integrated marketing tools to know more.

Optimize for Mobile Viewing

The usage of smartphones and tablets is on the rise. Statista reported that by the end of 2022, 68% of the world’s population were smartphone users. Pixpa is mobile-friendly and works fantastic on all mobile devices. It gives you fully responsive templates and pages.

Your content adapts to the mobile devices automatically. Pixpa gives you multiple customization and design options for your mobile website.

Pixpa also gives you Photo Gallery Apps for creating personalized mobile gallery apps for your clients. You can share your work, build your brand, deliver value, and get more referrals.

Take feedback

Before going live with your portfolio website, do ask for feedback. Having an outside opinion on your freshly designed photography website gives you different perspectives.

It gets challenging to become impartial for the things you have created yourself, and that too for the first time. Listening to someone else’s feedback - like friends, family, or colleagues - can help optimize the navigation, rectify design issues, and improve your website.

Keep your site updated

Update your website regularly to keep the content fresh and relevant. Ensure visitors regularly see new images on your portfolio website to keep them engaged. Keeping your website updated ensures visitors trust that you are producing great work. Plus, being up-to-date has become synonymous with reliability.

Promote your portfolio

Once you have launched your photography portfolio website, promote it by posting on social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram. Or, link it to a photography platform such as Behance and Dribbble.

You can also buy pay-per-click ads to market your portfolio on Google and Facebook. OR, simply spread the word amongst your friends, family, and professional network.

Some tips and best practices for creating a photography portfolio

Create both digital and print portfolios

You may already be actively available on Instagram or LinkedIn. You may also be posting some of your best work over there. But only some people are on social media. Having dedicated pages that feature only the best of your work matters.

Even though printing your photos seems quaint, having a hard copy of your portfolio is beneficial in face-to-face meetings with a prospective client. Looking at your photos in glorious analog detail enables a creative director to imagine the final output when it is published.

Build your foundation

When you are just starting to create your portfolio, research the rates others are charging in your field and charge at the lower end to get those initial clients. Talk to your friends (even their kids and pets) to model for you. Or, request some owners of new businesses to allow you to shoot their products in exchange for photos.

Make sure that you do not shortchange yourself for too long and do not succumb to working for unpaid jobs because it devalues your work. Photographers, at the end of it all, have bills to pay.

Find and stick to your expertise

You may be good at shooting travel and wedding photos while doing sports photography on the side. But to a potential client or editor, such an overly broad portfolio can look disorganized and unfocused.

Pick a subject matter you want to excel in. Your focus should be a specialty or two you are most passionate about. Categorize into separate sections to keep things organized in your portfolio.

For instance, Sean Micah stuck to displaying his proficiency in fashion portrait photography and included some of his best works in his portfolio.

Showcase your style quotient and be consistent

Your style as a photographer can be anything ranging from lighting your subjects to post-processing the photos. Simply put, how you shoot and edit your photos should display your personality and highlight your differentiating factors.

Elena Klimkin, a lifestyle photographer, has developed her artistic style. Her portfolio isn’t a mixture of experimental techniques and borrowed aesthetics. It has a strong visual identity that will help potential clients know if this is what they are looking for.

Showcase your creative abilities through video

If you are confident in your ability to shoot perfect videos, add a video section to the website. Showing you are a videographer and photographer can give you an advantage over others. Also, clients would be pleased to know they don’t have to book a separate videographer.

Leo Dawson does this superbly, showcasing both photos and videos. In addition to photography, he also exhibits film and media projects from local arts organizations, artists, and charities

Find the essence of a story for building a narrative

Telling a story through photos instead of words can work wonders for you. You can arrange your best collection so that it tells stories about places, events, or sometimes about individuals. For example, Kerstin Gotz tells stories of motherhood, maternity, and newborn babies.

Edit and always look for outside opinions

Deciding on the best photos of yours to be included in your portfolio can be a daunting task. Seeking expert advice is a recommended option. Ask a professional photographer, photo editor, or mentor to review your selections.

Show work that is intentional and not just for credit

As a passionate photographer, you might have covered the Russia-Ukraine conflict, captured extreme close-ups of Lionel Messi at a promotional event at FIFA, or clicked photos of penguins in Antarctica. But if the photos are not up to par, you only do yourself a disservice.

Poorly captured photos of fascinating places, events, or objects remove the sheen.

Try to be critical of your work and figure out what to include and what not to do.

Try giving a proper sequence to your photo collection

Once you are all set, whittled down your pictures to the best of the best, it’s time to give it a sequence and lay them out properly. Rearranging the photos can be done as per mood, color, composition, or a combination thereof. The objective is to form a narrative from the first photo to the last. Dean Clarke does this perfectly in his collection of wedding photos.

Make an instant impression

When someone lands on your website, the first image they see should be one of the strongest. It should depict who you are as a photographer and be attractive enough to hypnotize the viewers. You have to make them want to keep on looking. Harcy’s portfolio has a fantastic slideshow on the first banner, reflecting her animal photography expertise.

Conclusion

Professional photographers must have a stunning online portfolio to let potential clients determine whether they are the right fit for the projects. Designing a perfect portfolio takes time.

As elaborated in this blog, you have to start by defining your goals, target audience, and niche. You can then gather the best photos you clicked yourself and pick a no-code website builder to create a photography portfolio easily.

From there on, choose the best layout for your needs and personality. Once done, consider including your story, achievements, pricing details, and customer testimonials to show credibility and build trust. Also, consider optimizing your image quality and navigation to leave a lasting impression on visitors.

While having a digital portfolio for your photography business is essential, it is recommended that you build a printed portfolio to stand out.

Sign up for free to launch your photography portfolio using Pixpa and kick your career in the right direction.