A photography portfolio brings together the best examples of your work, allowing you to showcase your photography to potential customers, clients, publishers, or curators. Learn how to make a photography portfolio in this complete guide.
If you’re looking to consolidate your photography into a photo portfolio, consider this your quick-start guide! Here, discover how you can bring together your best photography work and showcase it as part of a polished and professional photography portfolio.
We’ll look at photography portfolio examples to inspire your own digital photography portfolio, plus find helpful guidance on how to build a photography portfolio for print or for social media.
In this article, we’ll cover:
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What Is a Photography Portfolio and Why Do I Need One?
A photography portfolio brings together the best examples of your work, allowing you to showcase your photo work to potential customers, clients, publishers, or curators.
Many photographers build up a body of work that includes thousands (if not millions) of images, so a photography portfolio gives you the opportunity to filter and edit your photo library, and to present the very best work you have created.
Traditionally, photographers would create a print picture portfolio, which could be taken to client meetings or shared with magazine editors. While a print photography portfolio is useful for in-person meetings, many professional photographers will find that the majority of their work is sourced online, through website inquiries or social media.
A photography portfolio brings together the best examples of your work, allowing you to showcase your photography to potential customers, clients, publishers, or curators.
Do photographers need a portfolio, even when most of their new work is generated online? The need for a standout portfolio of photography actually becomes much greater now that most potential clients find photographers through the web.
In order to stand out in a crowded market, it’s essential that you curate a digital photography portfolio that showcases the type, style, and quality of work that you create.
Common Types of Photography Portfolios
Many professional photographers choose to specialize in one or a couple of types of photography, in order to more effectively appeal to a target audience.
Common types of photography portfolio might include wedding photography portfolios, event photo portfolios, fashion photography portfolios, food photography portfolios, product photography portfolios, or pet photography portfolios.
Some photographers might choose to build an online photography portfolio focusing on just one type—such as event photography—while maintaining a separate digital portfolio for a different type of photo work.
This highly specialized approach can be extremely beneficial for maximizing your online search (SEO) potential.
Three different types of photography portfolio templates from Squarespace, including architectural photography, food photography, and landscape photography.
What Should Be Included in a Photography Portfolio?
Acting as the flagship billboard for your business, a picture portfolio should include the photography that fully represents you and your work as a photographer.
All of your chosen photos should demonstrate exceptional photographic skills and build a strong narrative that clearly shows what type and style of photography you can offer to your clients.
How many photos do I need for a photography portfolio?
A photography portfolio should include between 10 to 25 of your most stunning photographs, with one or two of these photos acting as headline images for a website landing page or photography portfolio cover.
How should I organize my photography portfolio?
In terms of how to build a photography portfolio, focus on creating a story arc throughout your imagery, to build a narrative throughout the portfolio photography.
You can do this by grouping your chosen images into related sub-groups, and teaming these together in the photo portfolio. This will create the impression of mini stories throughout the course of your portfolio, providing a natural route for the viewer to follow.
You should also look to include a brief bio and resume at the start or end of your portfolio, as well as contact details for interested clients to get in touch.
5 Creative Photography Portfolio Website Examples
These inspiring photography portfolio examples show how to build a photography portfolio online that breaks the mold and goes beyond the standard gallery grid.
Experimental use of typography, color, and interactive, UX design elements serves to only highlight, rather than distract from, the beautiful photography on show.
1. Axel Vanhessche
Paris-based photographer Axel Vanhessche takes a bold and ultra-colorful approach to the layout of his online photography portfolio.
Photographic images and type are creatively layered to create a maximalist, collage-like effect that really puts across Axel’s feel for fun, eclectic brand photography.
2. Art Sphere
While not an individual photographer’s portfolio, creative agency Art Sphere features a wide range of photographic talent and is a great example of quirky yet minimal photography portfolio design.
A scrollable gallery is given a point of difference with overlayed text and jaunty image boxes.
3. Steven Taylor
Photographer and art director Steven Taylor completely immerses the viewer in his world of emotive photography through use of full-width imagery and playful video shorts.
Elegant color branding ties together the branding of this stylish digital photography portfolio.
4. LM Chabot
Photography partnership LM Chabot translates the style of their distinctive pop-art-meets-surrealism photography to the style of their online photography portfolio.
A stark white background is the perfect partner to pops of playful color and quirky stop-motion animations.
4. Dean Bradshaw
Brimming with grit and edge, the photo portfolio of LA-based photographer Dean Bradshaw feels like stepping into an incredibly cool road trip movie.
A black background is the perfect moody blank canvas for showcasing this photographer’s character-filled portraits and cinematic-style imagery, created for a huge range of brands, magazines, and movies.
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How to Create an Online Photography Website
Learn how to make a photography portfolio to impress with these handy tips for how to start a photography portfolio online.
What Tools Should I Use to Build a Portfolio Online?
A digital photography portfolio can be hosted on a website domain or created using an online portfolio maker, such as Adobe Portfolio, Behance, or Jimdo, while platforms like Squarespace allow photographers to build an online portfolio that also integrates eCommerce features for selling prints or art photography.
How Much Does it Cost to Make a Portfolio for Photography Online?
The cost of creating an online photography portfolio can vary depending on the platform you choose to use and whether you will need to enlist the help of a web designer or web developer.
Some websites can cost as little as $100 to set up and host, but you will require some knowledge of building websites to keep your online portfolio budget-friendly.
Many online portfolio makers are intuitive to use, even for photographers with little web design experience, but you may be tied into hosting the portfolio on the maker’s platform and to pay a subscription fee for this.
To minimize costs, you can purchase the domain and hosting yourself, separately, and use a website template or WordPress template to build the website layout.
Once your photography portfolio is live, you will also need to factor in the costs and time for promoting the site through search engine optimization (SEO), Google Ads, and/or social media advertising.
What Is the Best Design for an Online Photography Portfolio?
The style and layout of an online photography portfolio should always serve to showcase your photographs in their best possible light.
For this reason, many online photo portfolios have a simple, minimal website style, featuring plenty of white space, and allowing high-resolution images to shine as part of a gallery grid or simple, full-width layout.
Most modern website designs are now responsive, allowing for images to scale responsively as the screen width changes.
The advantage of creating a responsive website for an online photography portfolio is that this allows your images to appear as big and beautiful as possible, whether a visitor is viewing your photo portfolio on a large desktop screen or a mobile.
All you need to ensure is that the images on your digital photography portfolio are as ultra high-resolution as possible, which means editing your images to include a DPI of 300 or more.
How to Create a Print Photography Portfolio
While digital photography portfolios are becoming more commonplace for professional photographers, there is still a place for traditional photography portfolios, which come into their own when photographers attend interviews, or meet clients, agencies, or editors.
A print portfolio for photography is usually a hardcover book or spiral bound folder, which contains 20 to 40 pages of your best images. You can also include a biography, resume, and a means of getting in touch.
If you’re intending to leave copies of your print portfolio with clients, keep in mind that you may not get them back! The expense of a print portfolio is mainly in printing and distributing copies, so make sure to only take your portfolio for temporary meetings, or reserve gifting your portfolio copies for particularly special clients.
You can design a print photography portfolio template using publishing software like Adobe InDesign, which allows you to create multi-page books or brochure layouts, before exporting them as printable PDF documents.
How to Use Instagram to Create an Online Photography Portfolio
Want to know how to make a photography portfolio that brings in new business? You should consider social media—and particularly Instagram—as an additional way to build a photography portfolio.
Instagram is a great way to find new customers, particularly if you are looking to locate ‘tribes’ of already engaged consumers.
What this means is that social media is different for every individual, with any one person accessing the app to find content that is specifically curated for them.
With this in mind, savvy photographers can bypass the difficulties of reaching a target audience by using Instagram to do this for them.
As an example, a wedding photographer can use hashtags, Instagram ads, and a follower-finding strategy to specifically focus on reaching individuals who have recently got engaged, or are already interacting with wedding-related content.
Many other lifestyle-oriented types of photography, such as pet photography, food photography, and travel photography, also resonate strongly with audiences through social media platforms.
To create an Instagram online photography portfolio, it’s as simple as creating an account and beginning to build up a curated gallery of posts.
You can keep audiences engaged with behind-the-scenes videos of photo shoots on Instagram stories, or offer exclusive discounts on shoot sessions to your followers.
You can also experiment with unusual layouts for your grid, extending images across multiple posts to create a more immersive effect, or integrating video or color branding into your Instagram profile page.
Conclusion: Grow Your Photography Business with a Stunning Portfolio
Perhaps one of the oldest and most successful marketing tools for photographers, a beautiful portfolio design can really help you to stand head and shoulders above the creative competition.
An alternative, or ideally additional, marketing approach to the online photography portfolio or traditional picture portfolio is to invite potential clients to an open evening at your photo studio space.
You can use the studio as a gallery space for showcasing your work, and create a buzz around a photography exhibition through your website or social media channels.
For more business building guidance, as well as tutorials for expanding your portfolio for photography, look no further:
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