Hi Keen Traveller,
excited about your own photos? I bet you are, as well as your family and friends. Good starting point so why not to taking the next step and showing them to the world? It’s high time you created a portfolio or improved the existing one! Make it faultless (and flawless). 🙂
You will find out how to:
choose — you will reconsider including pictures of Eiffel Tower,organize — nobody likes getting lost in visual chaos,describe photos and yourself — it may save your ass and prevent from loosing potential clients.
Following these pieces of advice can take you closer to fame.
Mistake 1: too many pictures of your friends or family
You spent amazing holidays together, and you are a person who documented it. You took plenty of photos with them having fun. Your friends love them, you do as well. When you are looking through your photo resources you may face a temptation to include them in your portfolio.
If you do, resist it!
You have personal reasons to like the images which evolve emotions and memories. Your audience don’t have that, and they will see only smiling faces.
Moreover, while taking holidays’ photo you usually don’t plan a composition or camera settings which make a picture the piece of art. Accidental stunning effect are rare.
I’m not going to refrain you from including any of your holidays photos in your portfolio. Just be critical about them. The solution I could recommend is showing the chosen set to people out of your friends circle and ask for honest opinion. If they pay attention mostly to holidays topic you should reconsider choosing the pictures.
Anyway, we really know this temptation too.
Once our team went to Prague. See what we captured:
And now imagine the photo without our smiling friend…
It would be completely different!
Mistake 2: similar pictures
Don’t clutter your portfolio with too may shoots of one place. Having seen three of them your viewers will find it boring. You want to keep the audience excited and prove your photographic skills, don’t you? So choose!
There are no rules on how many photos of one place you should showcase.
On Photler there are curatored galleries, in which all users’ photos can be featured. Each is devoted to particular city or country, as there are places that many our users captured. Many of them are great, but we want to keep the visitors interested, so we accept at most a few (2–5) photos of one subject, and only if all of them are really unique. From time to time we change photos in the collections to give our users a chance to present themselves. It turned out to be a golden mean in our case.
Mistake 3: icons that everybody knows
Monumental Eiffel Tower is impressive. No wonder that you took photos of it. If you are pretty proud of them it is understandable that you consider including them in your portfolio.
Let’s do a little experiment and search in Google for “ Eiffel Tower photos”…
You will see never-ending list of results. You can spot photos taken in every possible time of day, during every season. A lot of close-ups, and as many photos from distant perspective.
Before uploading another one to the Internet, answer one simple question. Why do you want to share it? Does it show the building in a unique way? If so, lucky you, you’ve managed to achieve impossible! Show it to the world without second thoughts! 🙂
Look at the image below, taken by Piotr. The tower doesn’t dominate over the surroundings as usually. It shows only a part of the building and exposes also the local context. This is a new, fresh perspective.
Sean took a photo of Meoto Iwa (Wedded Rocks) in Japan. He chose a perfect moment with unique light which made magical colours.
And now, compare his shoot with these that can be found on the Internet. The devil is in the detail, isn’t he?
Don’t worry! Even if you captured an icon from a common perspective, it shouldn’t get stuck in your private collection! Perfect settings or a great composition are worth boasting about. Your potential client may love it, and who knows, give you a buzz?
Mistake 4: poor organisation of your collection
If you feel lost on any page, will you leave? I bet so unless the site is so crucial that your life depends on the information it covers.
However, great, informative websites are usually easy to navigate.
Yours should be such as well… Your photos deserve it!
You have a huge collection of photos from all over the world. For your visitors’ sake divide images into collections devoted to particular places. They won’t get lost in one huge and chaotic set of photos.
Why not to include a map in your portfolio and just mark places you already visited? Such visual interface may be even more appealing for travel lovers, who prefer to choose a destination at once instead of scrolling a long list. Look how amazing such a map can look:
Only one more thing, if you don’t want your website to look dead, update it! Otherwise, your audience will forget about you, and even worse Google will do the same. Your site doesn’t have high rank, you don’t exist. I’m little exaggerating, but you need to remember about SEO.
If you want to peek into your visitors mind, visit peek.usertesting. A real person will test it! Peek is an on-line tool that analyses usability of your website. You can check up to 3 pages monthly for free. If you feel like doing it, take a five-minute break and check your right now.
Mistake 5: avoiding texts
The picture is worth a thousand words… You hear it again and again.
But words add an extra value to the photos. If you post only images you are anonymous provider of memorable shoots. Show yourself and tell your stories. This will create a connection between you and your viewers, and they will be more eager to contact you. 🙂
It isn’t just a set of great portraits. There are travel context and personal experience that stay beyond it. And you feel it.
Running a blog is a good option. Apart from telling personal stories, consider sharing a camera settings or describing obstacles you had to deal with while taking photos. Give tips on travel or equipment to generate even more traffic on your site.
If you are wondering how to start, have a look at our previous post covering this topic!
Mistake 6: lack of “About me”
Again it is about text.
But this one is vital. This is about you.
“About me” pages are often visited, and 52% of visitors want to see company information. (Source: KoMarketing) Most people want to know closer the great photographer or a blogger. You want to make them feel the connection.
Write a few sentences and tell story — how you started with your passion, what are your dreams or aims. Make them believe that you stand out of crowd. Make it personal, make it just yours. On the other hand, keep it meaningful, inspiring, motivating, but short. Say what is important and stop. People are busy so detailed history of your life, even if interesting, may discourage them.
Mistake 7: lack of contact info
You have an impressive set of photos from all around the world and you successfully run a blog, so think that you are an expert and people love you! So what now apart from keeping your portfolio updated? Are you just looking forward for a contact from your fans and potential clients?
But wait! Before you start, make sure you have included to your website contact info or a contact form. Their localisation needs to be as obvious and intuitive as possible. Good idea is to have a dedicated subpage. Don’t expect that if somebody wants to find you, they will manage to do it. Don’t require any extra effort from their side because you want to hear from them as well. Otherwise, you visitors may become frustrated and you may lose them… forever.
Unreasonable risk. Do not take it.
Yes, you’ve done it! You know how to make your portfolio ready to see the world!
Have any other common mistakes come to your mind? If so, let us know!
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Originally published at photler.com on May 25, 2016.