Building a Portfolio??

[mjremijan]

I am completely new to photography. I of course love taking pictures, but with that said I am having trouble figuring out what to do with them! For vacation, family weddings, Christmas, things like that the pictures are great and I love to have them to tell the story of what happened that year. But now as I go out and just shoot looking for interesting things I have no idea what to do with these pictures? How do I sift through them? How do I organize them? Do I use them to build a "portfolio"? What is a portfolio? Any discussion would help me I think.

[Henry Wilt]

I don't know how much use this will be to you as I know nothing about portfolios (I thought they were just used for people in business to sell themselves and their services?) but Lightroom seems to be an excellent way to organise photo's. I read an article recently describing it as a database for photographs which allows you to catalogue and then retrieve (or search for) pictures using several different "tagging" methods. I got the link from here but can't find it again at the moment and stupidly didn't bookmark it,, maybe someone here can point you to it.
I hope that helps in some small way.

[OsmosisStudios]

Originally Posted by mjremijan

How do I sift through them?
How do I organize them?
Do I use them to build a "portfolio"?
What is a portfolio?

I'll treat questions 1 and 2 together, because they go well together. There are many ways of organizing photos, and the way your organize them is going to be how you get through them. A lot of people like doing it chronologically (old to new). I do it by contest. So my portraiture shoots are in a folder called "portraits", my fashion stuff is in "fashion", and so on.

Questions 3 and 4 go together too. A portfolio is a collection of your best work usually used to help one sell onesself, either in business or academia. It's usually fairly small (20 or so pictures), and shows off your best work.

Making one is fairly easy: get your best work together, print it, and place it strategically in an album that you can edit. I have 40 pages, but my portfolio is usually no more than 20 photos: I tailor it to whatever im doing. If im going in for a portrait job, I dont show landscapes.

[Jim Bryant]

Get other opinions, not from friends (they'll just tell you how great you are), seek out professionals in your area and have them help edit your work. Actually, go ask the photographers from your local newspaper as they are well rounded in all photographic categories: sports, portraits, Scenics and such. Good luck!