Portrait photography portfolio examples

Ideas

Portrait photography portfolio ideas worth stealing

Seven things that hold up across every portrait portfolio worth the scroll.

• 1

  Show fewer pieces than you want to

  The instinct is to prove range. The effect is to dilute it. Six pieces you would defend in a meeting beat twenty you would explain.

• 2

  Lead with one strong image, not a menu

  A visitor decides whether to keep scrolling before they read anything. Give that decision one image to work with, not a list of options.

• 3

  Put contact one click from everywhere

  Every page needs a way to reach you that does not require going back to the top. Footer, sticky header, end of each project. Somewhere.

• 4

  Own the domain

  A portfolio on someone else's subdomain reads as a trial. Your own domain costs less than a coffee a month and it is the first thing an art buyer notices.

• 5

  Group galleries by session type, not by year or client name

  Headshots, families, seniors, editorial. A buyer picks the label that matches the shoot they are about to book, and a client-name structure makes them dig for it.

• 6

  Open each gallery on a face at the crop it was shot for

  A headshot buyer and a family-session buyer scan for different first frames. The image that opens a gallery is doing the selling, so it should match what that gallery is for.

• 7

  Cap a gallery at around twenty frames and never show the same sitter twice

  Range across faces reads faster than depth on one. Repeating a sitter tells a visitor the book is thinner than it looks.