So, Mike Johnston of The Online Photographer made a post about the trouble photographers can have making good small versions of their portfolios to show off to people in setting where it’s impractical to show the whole thing:
A few weeks later he sends me a link and an email. Email says he’s been working very hard at the edit and describes some of the process. Link contains 30 or 40 pictures.
All the pictures I really liked from the 850 are gone.
Always a potential problem. Either you “self-edit” someone’s work by sifting through large masses of pictures, or you look at a tighter set and risk maybe not seeing the ones that would be the payoff for you.
I’ve never had a solution for this dilemma.
I don’t have a solution for the dilemma, but I have a way of playing around with it that might be helpful, and should be good blog cross-promotion. Basically I’m looking for other photographers who are like me – you have a blog, you have a several-hundred-photo portfolio – to play a game. We each look through each other’s portfolio, pick out a small number of the ones we like the best – probably ten or so, lest too many photos swamp the blog – and blog about it. If we do this several times, then we’ll get several different perspectives on our work, and have a better idea of how to form a best-of portfolio that will make a strong first impression.
