Choosing photos for your portfolio

I recently had some new prints made to update my portfolio. I haven’t added new photos to it since around April or May, so I thought it was time to get some new stuff in there.

The two first rows are my old portfolio. The two bottom rows are the photos I just had printed.

I put together a few tips for those of you who're updating your ports soon:

What to look for in your photos?

- Variety
You need to know your client. When you know whose attention you’re trying to get, choose your work based on that. If you’re looking to get into the fashion industry, choose only your best fashion photos, but show variety in terms of style. You don’t want them to think that you’re only capable of doing one type of work. Expand your range and more options will open up.
- Technical abilities
You want to show off your best craftsmanship, so choose photos that show your skill in terms of lighting and composition, but remember that you’ll also want to show that you’re capable of making your models look good, so people will know that you’re able to make a connection with whom you’re working and are able to instruct the person in front of your camera.

Newest work vs. older stuff?
Say you’re going through a creativity block and your newer stuff just doesn’t look as good as some of your older work, what should you choose to show in your port? You have to find that balance between showing your best work while keeping it current. So choose your best photos, but have a few recent photos also be part of your portfolio.

How many photos should you choose?
Only your absolute best! Remember your want your portfolio to reflect quality over quantity, so I would say somewhere between 10-20 photos.

Remember to be critical of your own work. You can still appreciate and love what you’ve done, but recognize where you need to improve to become a better photographer.

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These are the photos I chose for my portfolio. Notice only one of my older photos made the cut, while I love all the other photos too, quality-wise the ones I ended up choosing were just better.

Personally, I find that few pieces in my collection are full body photos and I want change that. Portraits and photos of which the focus is the expression of the model are I what really love to do, but when I look at artists whose work I admire, I find myself wanting to do more shoots where the focus is the full body pose and the given surroundings. Also I want to work on my light setups, both in the studio as well as on location. When I brought my softbox with me on the Snow White shoot, I found that it created more options.

So I guess I have my work cut out for me, hehe.

On another, but related note, I just got a new camera which I'm really excited about, naturally, but I'll talk more about that once I've had time to do a test shoot with it :D