As a food photographer, your online portfolio shouldn’t be your only sales tool, but it’s your most important one. When marketing to clients, your online portfolio is the first step in putting your work in front of potential clients.

As the saying goes, you have only one chance to make a first impression, so your online portfolio should make them sit up and take notice.

Here are some of my top tips to help you curate your online food photography portfolio.

Have a Custom Website

A link to your Instagram feed or even your portfolio on Behance is not acceptable as your main portfolio. You need your own website with a custom domain. There are so many web builders with templates to choose from that putting up your own website, is pretty simple, even if you’re not very tech savvy. Check out Squarespace, Photoshelter, or Format, as these sites offer great options for photographers.

When it comes to your domain name, I recommend using your own name —and also using it for your business, as it’s much easier for clients to use and recognize.

Print Out Your Best Images

Does it seem hopelessly old school to suggest that you print out your images as the first step in curating your online food photography portfolio?

Although we live in the digital age, print is not dead. In fact, a printed portfolio and other marketing collateral should factor into a multi-pronged approach to marketing.

It also can be an important first step in curating your online food photography portfolio. Choose your best images—the ones that you’re considering including in your portfolio and have them printed in a 4×6 format. You can get these professionally printed or print them yourself if you have a colour printer.

Spread them out on the floor or a large table and look at ways you can marry them together to create galleries with a cohesive story and flow.

You can do this exercise with an app like Moodboard, but I find this exercise more effective to do with printed images, as it’s more tactile and connects you with your work on a deeper level. The brain just seems to like it more.

Curate Your Galleries Based on Colour, Theme, Shape, and Texture

When curating your galleries, ensure that you have a variety of camera angles, colours, shapes, textures, and depth represented.

You also want to make sure that your work shows competence in a different lighting approaches and treatments. For example, if you have all dark and moody images in your portfolio clients will think that you don’t know how to do light and airy photos and may pass you by.

That being said, do make sure you have a cohesive look to hinge your portfolio on. I have a lot of different lighting styles in my portfolio, but my photography is very colourful with high contrast—these are the through lines in my body of work. What are yours?

Also, make sure that you don’t have too many repeating props and backgrounds, as your images will look, they are from the same shoot.

Use a Mosaic Style Format

For the last several years, a mosaic style presentation of images has been a popular approach for online portfolios. This is not to say that you can’t choose another format, however, the mosaic style has endured, as it allows clients to see your style and get a feel for what you’re about with a single glance.

Clients and art directors are very busy people. You really need to impress them in the first few seconds on your site. The extra effort it takes to go through a slideshow can be the detraining factor that decides whether your portfolio gets seen or not.

Hire a Professional Photo Consultant

Curating your online food photography portfolio can be challenging for a food photographer. You can get very attached to certain images, and those that you feel are your best ones may not necessarily resonate with your target audience, and vice-versa.

This is where hiring a professional photo consultant can be really valuable. They can lend a neutral eye and give you some much needed constructive criticism. Photo consultants bring a practiced eye to your work and are experts at the trickiest aspect of curating an online portfolio—pagination.

It’s really important create flow and narrative in your portfolio. With food photography, there is typically a variety of colours, textures, patterns angles within a body of work, which can make transitions and pairings especially challenging. A professional photo consultant can help you put together an online portfolio with a narrative that is that is seamless, rather than jumbled and confusing.

If hiring a professional photo consultant is out of your budget, then recruit a photographer friend to give you, their input. When assessing our body or work, it can be difficult to see the forest for the trees, so getting some outside feedback can be very valuable.

Conclusion

Curating your online food photography portfolio involves a lot of hard decisions. The process is a personal one with a myriad of possibilities.

However, unlike a printed book, it doesn’t cost anything to make changes or update your portfolio. In fact, you should do the soften to boost your SEO.

Need more help with your food photography business? Get The Pricing Workshop, our online masterclass on pricing your food photography the right way.