All about Photography Portfolios – Part 1 – Sharing Sites

Aug 11, 2009 by Matt Voran

 

One of the most important things for a photographer, is exposure. Pardon the pun, in this case I am talking about people seeing your work!  What’s the point of a photo if it’s not shared with other people who can appreciate and enjoy it.  In addition to that, how are you going to get commissioned professionally, if you don’t have a way for people to see what they are buying?!  In this 3-part post, I am going to talk about (1) photo sharing sites such as flickr and imagekind, (2) creating your own custom sites, and (3) show you what others out there are doing so you can make a good decision on how you want to approach your portfolio.  Let’s get started.

Sharing Sites

By now, you have probably at least HEARD of Flickr, Photobucket, or Imagekind. Maybe you have heard of others, even Facebook can be considered a “photo sharing site” even though that’s not its only function.  For our purposes, let’s focus on two sites.  I think Flickr and Google’s “Picasa Web” are great places to start. 

Flickr

Flickr is an absolute dream community for photographers.  I apologize if I sound biased, but I just LOVE FLICKR.  I think you will too.   The premise is simple.  Sign up – the basic account is free (and always will be) and for most people starting out, its all you will need.  Once you’ve signed up, start uploading pictures!  Once you have uploaded pictures, start submitting them to ‘Groups’.   Groups are like little sub-communities usually focused on specific types of images. So if you really love to take pictures of your dogs, then a dog or animals or pets group is for you.  Search for those groups and join them!  Then submit your images to the group.  Now people will look at your shots, and comment!  Trust me it gets addicting fast.   Making contacts is another way to get lots of exposure, and if one of your pictures gets a lot of attention, and fast, you might land on the front page (which Flickr calls “Explore”).   You can really get lots and lots of exposure to your photography this way. And its free and fun.  One other benefit is that you get a fairly simple and reasonably short personal URL to give to friends, family etc. so they can go and visit your “photostream”.

Picasa Web Albums

Picasa Web Albums is Google’s take on photo sharing, and as with most of Google’s products, it’s fantastic.  It all starts by signing up at http://picasaweb.google.com which if you already have a Google account (email or otherwise) you will just use those credentials.   The web interface is great, and its easy to upload and organize images. Then you can share your personal URL with friends and family. You can set each image or gallery to be public or private as you see fit.   There is also an explore feature which lets you view other peoples public photos, and comment – although in my opinion if you are looking specifically for these types of “community” features, stick with Flickr. 

Where I think that Picasa really shines is in sharing with friends and family, and the integration with the desktop Picasa application.  I’ve written a little about this in the past.   The Picasa application is super awesome, and super FREE.  It lets you do a large amount of editing and special effects including red-eye fixing, black and white conversion, cropping etc. etc.   Not only that but it keeps all your photos organized, makes it easy as pie to upload to Picasa Web Albums and to email photos directly and efficiently (so your not that guy who sends the 15mb image that blows up your families inbox’s.)   There are even features to let you send images directly to Walgreens and other print shops.  COOL.

Summary

If your main goal is just to share and enjoy photography, these two sites are great places to start.  If you want to move more towards commercializing your photography, stay tuned for Part 2, or in the meantime, read my article “Sell Your Photos”.

That’s all for part 1, I hope that you check these sites out to get started sharing your photos. After all, that’s why we take them!