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Start culling your photos for a more effective portfolio

by 3 Comments

One of the most common things I see today, especially from newer photographers is posting far too many images from a session online. We’ve all seen it, and probably all done it at some point. You go to a photographer’s page, look at their photos, and you see 50 images from one shoot, followed by 50 from another, then 50 from another.

While we’re proud of many things we create, this can really dilute our most impressive work. In this two-minute tips video, photographer David Bergman explains why we should edit ourselves and cull our work down to only the very best.

 

I’ve always been a big believer in only showing your best work. Even with clients that expect a large variety of images, say a wedding, nobody’s going to sit and look through 300 photos of somebody else’s wedding to decide if they’re going to hire you. They just want to see a small selection of your very best work from a variety of weddings.

And if you’re looking at commercial clients, forget sending them hundreds of images. Don’t link to a website portfolio that hundreds of shots, either. Nobody’s going to look at that. They’ll skip over you in favour of a portfolio that gets right to the point.

You want to show a variety of images that show off your abilities, styles and techniques. But you don’t need to demonstrate each one 20 times. And you don’t want to dilute that collection of amazing images with a whole bunch that are just “ok”. If people have to hunt to find your best work, the images of which you’re most proud, they’ll never see them.

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About John Aldred

John Aldred is based in Scotland and photographs people in the wild and animals in the studio.

You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube and Facebook.

  • Tj Ó Seamállaigh

    Tell me about it. I’m really tired of those posting 2390849283 images successively on instagram. First of all, there is a swipe option now that fits 10 photos I think, so you can post most of what you want in a single post. Secondly, it’s really like flooding the feed. At the end of the day, I really end up skipping the whole session for that user and not Like any of their work (and in extreme cases, I’d simply unfollow).

  • It’s all about time and experience, i am not professional photograph, i just do it as a hobby to escape from desk work. At first when i started photographing i was just making tens of shots from same thing same frame, just doing different settings in camera and processing them with different filters and posting than i realized i have 10 photos of same thing just pink, white, brown, yellow, etc… than things just become crowded and dull and i started removing photos and deleted unnecessary doubles. And over the time you start gaining experience and sense so eventually you stop culling your photos again but than it’s because you become experienced and stopped making tens of photos of the same scene, you just learned to move, adopt, visualize and started taking less photos but with more quality, story and difference.

  • Mark Niebauer

    I’m a professional editor. I agree with him. .

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