Aug 02 2021 16 mins 1
Today I will be going through the process of creating a photo portfolio for your website. I received a question from Dean who says,
I’m looking at starting a career in photography. I need to build an online photo portfolio to attract future customers. My interests are street photography, family portraits and headshots
What are some tips for creating a portrait portfolio and should I use paid models or real people?
8 Tips how to create a portfolio for your new website
We discuss the topics:
* Hiring models vs real people for a portfolio* The added bonus of using real people* Using ads to get people to photograph* Photographing what you want to photograph* Get someone to critique your portfolio * Learn to relax your subjects* Have a contract for your portfolio subjects* How to organize your portfolio on your website
Let’s get stareted!
1. Hiring models vs real people for a portfolio?
In regards to hiring models vs finding real people to photograph for your portfolio. As you can imagine, there will be a bit of a difference with the end result.
If you’re new to portrait photography, hiring a model that is experienced with posing themselves and understanding how to interact with the camera can help you ten fold because your job will be so much easier.
You literally just have to set up the lighting, if you’re using natural lighting, it’s even easier and then it’s just a matter of interacting and photographing your model and you’ll get the photos your after for your website portfolio.
There’s pros and cons to using paid models, some models are very good looking, which is not a bad thing, but if you have a portfolio on your website people like to see themselves especially in portrait photography or family photography.
They want to be able to picture themselves in your photos. Otherwise they may not be able to relate to your photography.
With a professional model their poses may look too posed, like what you would see in a magazine. As a result future customers may get put off with static poses, that’s something to think about.
When some people get family portraits done they’re not perfect. They’re not really perfect in the sense that there’s giggles and laughter and sometimes the posing is not 100 percent perfect and these natural looking facial expressions and reactions are what parents and families see themselves.
So that’s just something to think about. There’s nothing wrong with using professional models for your online portfolio.
In fact, I’ve done it a few times early on in my career.
What I did learn when first transitioning from sports photography to portraits, Family portraits and weddings is it really helped me to try and understand what a difference good posing makes to a photo.
The few times that I did hire a model, I didn’t learn everything, but I could see the difference between somebody that knew what they were doing compared to a family that was going to get their first portrait session.
It’s worlds apart. So just keep in mind that hiring a model may give you a false sense of security because they will make your job a lot easier and that’s what I found.
When editing my photo portfolio, the photos with the paid model, you could see they knew how to direct their face towards the camera and how to move thei...
