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Thursday 21 August 2008

Online Photographic Portfolio

Where's the best place to show off your top work, the online photographic portfolio? The place where you weed out the shitty photos, group pools, comments and wanky rants by the photographer? The place where you see only the best photos from that photographer and basic information? Well, there are a few options out there and I'm going to list a few just for you, paid and free.

One option is to get your own site/domain/hosting plan. For either a professional or budding enthusiast making a few dollars from their photographic skills, I think this would be the best option. Although this opton is the most editable it is more time consuming and you may want to have some basic html and web design skills but there's a lot of help on the net. I think a good setup would be to get the server space, make a domain name, download wordpress.org's free software or pixelpost.org's software, create a portfolio with some free photoblog themes and a blog all on the same site. Use the blog to bullshit about shoots, ideas, hardware, etc and the portfolio to show your not only just talk, plus you'll probably have a flickr account too for networking. This all will cost you about $150 - $200 per year, not bad.

The free way is just as effective but not as compact, it's a little more spread out, just like here at Photo Shumi. I'm running this blog from blogger.com, my everyday photos at are at flickr and my portfolio is at fotologue. So that's what I want to tell you about, a few cool websites that offer free hosting of your photos, have clean, uncluttered interfaces and are easy to view and navigate your photos.

Personally, I recommend the Japanese run fotologue (don't worry, it's in English too). You get 20mb upload per month, a beautiful flash based dashboard and gallery and very fast uploading / viewing times. It is community based with comments, tagging and groups but it's not as full on as flickr where there's a group for every single topic known to humanity, at fotologue you can be fairly inconspicuous and use the gallery for showing off your work. And if you do happen to get into the community spirit, it's not clustered with shit photos and is quite inspiring to check out the other users. Look at my fotologue portfolio here.

Another free website is Aminus 3 where you can post a photo a day, check out this portfolio by fellow gaijin Mike Cash. Again, it's simple in design and easy for viewers to navigate which is the most important thing when prospective clients may be wanting to check out your work. Could you imagine giving out your card and having someone trawl through your flickr gallery, not good. So that's why I recommend using something that is a little more pleasing to the eye and gives the viewer a chance to see your best work without interference.

UPDATE : 27th 8th 2008

I just remembered another cool site to show your portfolio as well as have a blog, check out Uber.