Fonte: Naturescapes

1 – Introduction
Creating a portfolio of your work is one of the most important things you can accomplish as a photographer. Unfortunately, relatively few photographers create portfolios because they find the process daunting or think their work is not good enough to be included in a portfolio. Others squirm at the idea that they will have to review thousands of photographs taken over many years. Yet others do not know how to select photographs for a portfolio. Finally, there are those who believe that a portfolio cannot be created by themselves, that such an endeavor has to be conducted under the control of a museum or a gallery or needs to take place in the context of a retrospective of the artist’s work.

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2 – What is a portfolio?
Let’s start by taking a look at what a portfolio really is. Portfolio comes from the French porte folio, meaning a page carrier. A folio is a large page, roughly the size of a single newspaper page. Porte means to carry. A porte folio, shortened to portfolio in English, is a device designed to carry loose pages. The first goal of the porte folio is to hold these pages together in a secure place so they do not get lost or damaged. For artists these pages are works of art on paper.

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3 – Portfolios and Portfolios
In today’s digital age, a portfolio no longer needs to be printed. It can be created solely through digital means, either from scanned or digital photographs which have been color corrected and optimized, then presented a platform independent format such as PDF or jpeg.

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4 – Goal and Purpose
It is important to consider your goal and your purpose before creating a portfolio. Doing so will make the process a lot easier.

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5 – Audience
You also need to consider the audience to whom you will show your portfolio.

An audience does not necessarily consist of a large group of people. Some of us have small audiences, consisting of only a few persons, while some of us have large audiences, consisting of thousands or millions of people. However, regardless of the size of your audience, you do have to consider the relationship between your work and your audience.

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6 – Portfolios are not necessary aimed at showcasing a photographer’s best work

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there seems to be a myth that goes something like this:

A portfolio can only show the best work a photographer ever created.

The problem with this belief is three-fold:

• First, it is difficult to know what our very best work is. As artists we are understandably biased about our work, making such a selection challenging to say the least.
• Second, it is difficult to tell whether or not we have enough excellent work to put together a “best work” portfolio.
• Third, many photographers find the concept of a “best work ever” portfolio both pretentious and intimidating. As a result they postpone creating a portfolio of their work preferring to wait until their photography “gets better.”

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7 – The contents of a portfolio
Photographs are only part of the total content of a portfolio. After all, this is your opportunity to express yourself in ways other than with photographs. It is your opportunity to write, to talk about what you do, to explain why and how your images were created.

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