How to Make a Photography Portfolio

Video Transcript

"This is Anthony and we're going to talk about how to go about making a photography portfolio. The first thing you want to do to make a photography portfolio is you want to edit down your best, and I mean your best, 20 to 30 photographs. And those photographs, now they want to have a dialog with each other. You don't want to just throw in a couple of pictures of houses, a couple of pictures of people, a couple of pictures of my dog. That's like one of the worse things you can do. You want to have a cohesive amount of work that shows your style. Key. Second thing to making a portfolio is, how am I going to put together all of these pictures? You don't want to bring your pictures to potential job, employer, client in a paper bag, I mean, or in a shoe box. You want to present yourself. And, I mean this. I have seen people with the best presentation in the world and not such great images, but they still got the job. And I've seen people with the best photographs in the world and have the worst presentation and they didn't get the job. So, you really want to think about both. If you have awesome photographs, photographs you've worked hard on, that you've edited and you put them together with an awesome portfolio, you are going to be set. This is my portfolio. I have a handmade leather portfolio. Some people refer to this book as a dinosaur in a way. Most people nowadays have a website or a blog; I have all that. But I also like the physicalness of my portfolio. It's a great way to impress a client. This is a rather old one. This one has really been around, I've had it for about 15 years. But, in a way, the leather, it looks like, you know, it gets better as it gets older. It has a nice banana leaf insert and I can change my photographs in and out as I'm working with this book. And it just shows everything in an easy way for people to get a feel of what my work looks like. That's really the main thing you want with a portfolio. Now, I could carry around my images on a disk and a lot of times, I do. When I sit down with a client, I bring my laptop, put it in and they look at it. And you know what? Eighty percent of the time, that works perfect. But, I like to bring both. I have a disk and I have the physicality of this actual hard copy of my image. I just find as a photographer, this works the best. And, if I want to make something for somebody, if I'm printing another portfolio for another artist or another, if I'm doing a wedding or if I'm shooting an event and I can put together a story and put it in a book like this, my job is really done well. The other way that I can put a portfolio together is in an archival box. They sell them online, an archival box, 11 by 14, 8 by 10, probably cost you about twenty to fifty dollars. And that's essentially how I go about making a portfolio."