Blog

A photo on a screen is never seen alone. There is always a page around it, and the page takes up more of the screen than most people realize. Whatever color it is, your photos get judged against it.

That makes the background one of the few design choices that changes how the work itself looks. The same file can look brighter or darker, richer or flatter, depending on what sits next to it. Neither light nor dark is the better choice in general. It depends on the photos.

What the page does to a photo

Eyes judge brightness by comparison. Put a mid-gray square on a white sheet and it looks dark. Put the same square on black and it looks pale. Nothing about the square has changed.

A photo behaves the same way. On a white page, the page is the brightest thing in view, so everything in the photo looks a little darker beside it. On a dark page, the photo becomes the brightest thing in view, and it looks lighter and more luminous.

Look at the edges as well. The pale lower edge of the bright photo nearly merges with the white page, and the dark photo starts to lose its outline on black. We'll come back to that.

A light page

Choosing photos for a portfolio is harder than taking them. You were there for every frame, so each one carries something the viewer will never see: the early start, the light that lasted four minutes, the client who finally relaxed. A stranger only sees the picture. Most of the work of building a portfolio is learning to look at your own photos the way a stranger would.

Decide who the portfolio is for

Start with the person you want to hear from. A couple planning a wedding, an art director hiring for a campaign, and a gallery curator are all looking for different things, and one set of photos rarely serves all of them.

Write down the kind of work you want more of, then choose photos that would make someone hire you for exactly that. People tend to book what they can see. If half your portfolio is a genre you no longer want to shoot, inquiries for it will keep arriving.

This also settles what to do with work you are proud of that doesn't fit. It can have its own gallery, or it can stay in the archive. It doesn't have to sit next to everything else.

How many photos should a portfolio have?

There is no correct number, but fewer than you think is a safe starting point. As a rule of thumb, we would aim for 15 to 30 photos in a gallery, and a handful of galleries rather than a dozen. That is enough to show range and consistency,

Every digital photo carries a small note about how it was made. The camera writes it at the moment of capture and tucks it inside the file, where it travels with the image until something removes it. That note is EXIF data.

Most of the time nobody looks at it. It is still worth knowing what it says, because sometimes it says more than you meant to share.

What EXIF data records

EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File Format. It is a standard way for cameras and phones to store technical details inside an image file, alongside the picture itself. A typical file includes:

• The camera make and model, and usually the lens
• Exposure settings: shutter speed, aperture, and ISO
• Focal length
• The date and time of capture, according to the camera's clock
• Orientation, so software knows which way up the photo goes
• GPS coordinates, if the device has location turned on

Some cameras also record the body's serial number, and many let you set an artist name and copyright notice that get written into every frame.

None of this changes how the photo looks. It is text sitting next to the pixels,

Advice about watermarks tends to come in two flavors: put one on everything, or never use one at all. Neither is much help when you have a set of proofs to send tonight. The better question is what the photo is for. Proofing happens to be the case where a watermark has a clear job, as long as it's done with a light hand.

What a proofing watermark is for

A proof is a draft. The client is looking through the set to choose favorites, often before the final edit and sometimes before the final payment. A watermark on a proof says one thing: this is not the finished file.

That does two practical things. It makes the proof a poor substitute for the real delivery, so there's less temptation to print it or post it as is. And if the image gets forwarded to family or a group chat, your name travels with it.

Notice what's missing from that list. A watermark doesn't lock anything. We'll come back to that.

When a watermark hurts

A watermark gets in the way whenever the point is for someone to look at the photo properly.

Your portfolio is the obvious case. Visitors are deciding whether they like your work, and a mark across every image makes that harder. Final files a client has paid for are another. They should be clean.

Most portfolio platforms give you a free address when you sign up, usually your name followed by the platform's own domain. It works from the first minute and costs nothing. So the question comes up sooner or later: is paying for your own domain worth it, or is it one more thing to manage?

Our short answer is that it depends on what the portfolio is for. Here is how we think about it.

What a domain changes, and what it doesn't

A custom domain changes the address people see and type. Your photos, your layout and your loading speed stay exactly the same. A weak portfolio on a good domain is still a weak portfolio.

It also won't lift you up the search results by itself. Search engines rank pages on what is on them and on who links to them. The name in the address bar is not a shortcut.

What you do get is ownership of the address. A free address belongs to the platform. If you move to a different service one day, that address stays behind, along with every place you ever pasted it: your social bios, printed cards, directory listings, old emails, a blog that featured your work. With your own domain, you point it at the new home and the address on your business card still works. Individual page links may need tidying after a move, but the front door stays where people expect it.