Building a Strong Music Photography Portfolio

Building a strong music photography portfolio

A strong portfolio is an essential tool if you're looking for a career in photography, it shows potential clients your style, what you're capable of and also gives you a chance to out across your personality and character.

Your portfolio is a reflection of you and your work, it should be kept up to date and hold the correct amount of your imagery.

Online Portfolios 

It's so easy to build a portfolio online, there are numerous services you can use to show off your imagery. Before you get started, you should decide how you want to go about it - there are a couple of main routes you can take, a more social approach with services such as Instagram / 500pm / Flickr or decide to build your own stand along website, this can be much easier than you first think.

You should know your business name and make sure your desired domain name and social handles are available - it's important that you're consistent across all aspects of your online presence. If you're just starting out - you should read our Top 5 Tips for Beginner Music Photographers

It's important that you keep your portfolio up to date, anyone can view your online portfolio at any time of day - you'll want viewers to be seeing your latest and best work. As you improve as a photographer, you should remove any of your older work you feel doesn't represent your best work.

Leave people wanting more, this tip probably excludes social media - but it's so easy to want to put too much into your portfolio. Less can certainly be more in this situation, you'll want a varied cross section of the work you produce which has your style across the whole portfolio.

If potential clients can see a strong and consistent style across your work, you're more likely to get the gig as they will have a much stronger idea of the work you could produce for them.

If you also work in other areas of photography, try not to mix your message online - consider having a separate site or subdomain of your overall site. Have a think about how your portfolio will be perceived by others, if you come across as a specialist in music photography, that can only be a good thing. 

Femme + WOWH, Troxy Theatre

Social Media Portfolio

Social media is a massive part of your online presence and could warrant many articles on this topic alone. You shouldn't rely on social media as a single place to be online, a strong social presence media backed up by your own website is the best route to take. It reinforces you and your brand you're creating. Social media platforms naturally have a better SEO ranking due to the amount of being content posted every day, this is where consistency between social handles and domain names come into play - make sure they're the same (or at least very similar) so that there's no confusion if someone searches for you online.

Building Blocks

It takes time and commitment to build a strong music photography portfolio from scratch. It's a slow and considered process with what you should and shouldn't include. If you've shot a number of shows and want to start posting online, Instagram is the place to start, although many would disagree due to constantly changing algorithms. Post regularly and consistently, but don't post purely for likes and follows as you'll be disappointed quite quickly.

Don't Post Duplicates

If you're at a show and you fire off a sequence of shots and you're happy with all of them - don't post all of them, pick one of the series of shots, you don't need all of them so filter out the best one and process.

Journey to the Top

There are a limited opportunities in music photography, it's a difficult journey and you will have setbacks and disappointments, but once you have a network you can rely on, your portfolio will do the talking and regular opportunities will come your way. It takes hard work and dedication.

 

Faze Music Photography Magazine

Est. 2019

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