Portfolio...

As part of this unit as well as our own gallery, we have to make a portfolio. I have a portfolio which I used at the University interviews but that is definitely not up to date. I created that portfolio during the end of 2009 but obviously I have taken lots of pictures since then and instead of adding them to the end, I thought it would be a good idea to create a new portfolio. 

I wanted to have specific themes in my portfolio rather than having all the photos in a row without any real organization, so the first thing I had to tackle was which photos I wanted to use. I spent about an hour going through all the photographs I have and deciding whether they were worth putting in a portfolio. I came across a lot of photos that I really liked but never thought about putting it in a portfolio. In the end I managed to break it down into these 11 themes: Abstract, Borders, Commercial, Fashion/People, Fine Art, Interior/exterior, Music, Nature, Travel and Wildlife. 

The next thing I had to look at was how I wanted to present the images. Do I want one image per page or a few images per page? Since I am working with so many images, I decided it would be a lot better if I put a few images on one page, although have a few that take up a whole page. As you can see from the image on the right, I have a lot of pictures. It starts off with the first picture I have taken (at the age of 11), and then it starts going into all of the themes. I am not sure if this is the order I want to display my images in, but this is the general idea behind it. 

I have made all of these pages myself in Photoshop. The reason I created it this way instead of using templates is because the templates cropped the images in quite odd ways and there were specific layouts you had to choose from instead of making your own. For example, page 30 has square images. If I wanted to put this into a template the format would be changed into a rectangular shape. I managed to get 36 pages (one page is cropped off). The first page shall have a short explanation about who I am and what I am hoping to be. 

I am going to get these images printed in A4 and put them in a nice looking binder. This way I can add and get rid of images if I want to. If I were to get a book printed, it wouldn't give me any control over the images once I have taken more photos. I haven't gotten the images printed yet as I want a few more opinions. As I mentioned before, I am not sure whether this is the order I want the images to be in, but I will always be able to change that afterwards. 

The reason we want to have our portfolios at the exhibition is because for a lot of people, including me, the images we are hanging up on the wall don't represent the type of photography we do. This way people are able to look at all the different types of photography I am interested in and not just what's on the wall.