Having a beautiful portfolio as a professional photographer is incredibly important. It’s the best way to show off your work and inspire people to reach out and hire you. But, knowing how to build a photography portfolio takes a little time and consideration. Let’s dive into some food photography portfolio tips that I have learned in my experience as a professional food photographer.
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How To Build A Photography Portfolio
This is Part 1 of two blog posts. Part 2 is about How To Make Your Website Show Up In Google Searches.
How to build a photography portfolio includes showing your work in a strong, cohesive and professional way. You want to highlight the type work you want to get as a photographer, so it’s important to niche down to attract specific clients and projects. You also want to show the range of work that you can do within your niche in your online portfolio. Let’s talk about some portfolio tips to help you stand out.
Food Photography Portfolio Tips
1. Choose A Beautiful, Customizable Website Template
First things first, having a online portfolio that looks beautiful and is easy to navigate is really important. There are a lot of beautiful website templates to choose from these days, but the templates I recommend checking out by Tonic Site Shop. The templates are absolutely stunning and quite honestly, they’re the perfect fit for professional photographers.
Initially, I started using their templates just because I loved the look of them. But, there’s actually more things to take into consideration when it comes to choosing a beautiful website template including:
- Easy to customize for desktop
- Easy to customize for mobile
- Easy to edit fonts, colors, images, etc.
- Includes a blog for long-form copy
- Easy to add GA4 for tracking
- SSL certificate included in hosting package
- Easy to add important SEO data for Google
- Awesome customer service and quick response times
In a nutshell, Tonic Site Shop’s templates are pretty AND smart, because they cover all the bases. 😉 When you have a beautiful, easy-to-use template to work with, everything else you need to do falls into place easily.
2. Organize Your Images
Next, you’ll want to be sure to organize your images so your potential clients can easily browse through your work to get a good sense of your style. In my portfolio, I have my images organized and separated by category including, Dark, Light, Drinks, Action, Spaces & Published. Stay true to your niche and focus on highlighting images that reflect the type of work you want to get. Check out some of my food portfolio image examples below.
3. Show How You Work With Light
Being a photographer involves knowing how to work with light. Highlighting a variety of images using different types of lighting is a great way to show off the range of work you can do. Show a mix of soft light and hard light. Show a mix of natural light and artificial light. Some clients will recognize these differences right away and some may not know the difference at first glance. But, having a range within your portfolio gives you an opportunity to talk through different projects that required different types of light.
4. Show Off Your Personality
Use your About Page to your advantage and share a little more about yourself. You don’t need to write a novel or share your life story, but this is a good opportunity to let your clients know more about YOU. How did you get into photography? What do you love about it? What do you hate about it? How are you different? What are you doing when you’re not working? You should also link to your social media accounts so they can follow along with you to see what you’re sharing with your audience.
If you need a little inspiration for discovering your brand and how to talk about yourself, check out the book recommendation below. It’s a deep dive into how your business can stand out from the crowd and I found it to be incredibly insightful and helpful.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION: BADASS YOUR BRAND BY PIA SILVA
5. Make It Very Easy To Contact You
Make it very easy to contact you from your portfolio site. It won’t take a potential client very long to decide if they like your work, but don’t make them struggle to contact you. Include a “Contact tab” in your main navigation, in the footer of your website and if you can, on each page of your website so it’s front and center for them.
My recommendation is to not to use an email form. Sometimes forms fail to get the inquiries to you (I learned that the hard way) and people generally don’t like filling out forms if they don’t have to. Keep it simple and include a clickable link to your email.
6. Add A Blog
I recommend that all photographers have a blog on their website, but very few actually include one. The reason I recommend it is because it makes you look like even more of an expert in your industry. Not only can you show off beautiful images, but you can talk about how you did it. And, believe it or not, people are searching for a lot of “how to” topics when it comes to photography. People want to know how you do what you do, so why not talk about it?
Another reason I suggest including a blog is because Google loves long-form copy and a blog is a great way to include long-form copy on your website. As I mentioned earlier, when you have beautiful food photography portfolio site AND it’s showing up in Google searches, it’s a golden moment for you to get some strong leads.
But, there are also other things Google needs from your website in order for it to rank your website in searches, so be sure to check out my blog post: How To Make Your Photography Website Show Up On Google.
Reach out with questions anytime and be sure to follow me on Instagram!
Happy Creating!
This post may contain affiliate links which means if you click or make a purchase through my site, I might make a small commission (at no extra cost to you). I only promote products and equipment that I actually use for my photography business. Your support helps me continue to produce educational content about photography. Thank you!
All images ©Regan Baroni 2024.
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