How to get work you want to get.

I have a long history of corporate and product photography but you won't see much of this in my portfolio, but why? I remember years ago earlier on in my photography career I read a piece of advice that has stuck with me for awhile now.

"Don't put your best images in your portfolio, only show the work you want to do more of"

Regardless of what we think as an artist, in order to understand what we do, people like need to put everything into boxes/genres so they can work out and understand what they're looking at. The same goes for anything creative, if you're in a band and someone asks what kind of thing do you play, you either take the arrogant step of saying, "It's completely different from anything you ever heard, we play what we play" or you say, "It's a mix of grunge and country".

In photography if your portfolio consists of car photos, but you want to shoot fine art, a client won't see that there are similar lighting principles and control over the image, they will assume you are a car photographer and have no experience of photographing a building. Similarly if your portfolio consists of soley of scantily clad women that wouldn't look out of place in Nuts magazine then you might want to re-consider what you're showing a client interested in corporate head shots.




For me, I shoot a lot of varied subjects but then I have a lot of different portfolio's for different clients (made so much easier with an ipad and digital portfolio). But keep yourself open to everything, because you can always transfer learnings, but be very clear on what you want to do more of and adapt your porfolio to that.