Wedding Photography Online Portfolio Website

Wedding Photography Online Portfolio Website

If you’re new to covering weddings, you can turn to this guide to find out everything you need to create a wedding photography online portfolio website.

Many people consider their wedding day to be the most important day of their lives—so much so that couples can be extremely picky when deciding on a wedding photographer. After all, when you’re tasking one person to capture the biggest day of your life, you’ve got to make sure they know what they’re doing.

This is what makes building a wedding photography online portfolio website so difficult. More than just presenting your best photography work, your website should be able to assure potential clients that you’re capable of capturing every important, intimate moment and making it look beautiful.

So how can you build the perfect website? Here, we talk about the initial steps you can take to build up a decent portfolio, list down everything you must include on your website, and a peek at the best pre-sets you can pick out of our extensive selection of portfolio templates.

How to Create a Wedding Photography Portfolio

Creating a photography portfolio with limited experience can seem like an impossible task. Here are three practical solutions you can try:

Collaborate with Vendors

Weddings rely on so many different kinds of vendors coming together, from designers to florists to bakers and event managers. One practical way to build a wedding photography portfolio is to seek out wedding vendors in your area and offer to do trade shoots. This means offering yourself as a product photographer for their catalogs or portfolio sites in exchange for your own portfolio photos.

This approach doesn’t just get you portfolio-worthy photos despite having no weddings to attend yet, it also gives you the opportunity to build relationships with vendors who can vouch for you and recommend you to their own clients.

Offer To Shoot Friends’ Weddings

Most wedding photographers start out by shooting friends’ and relatives’ weddings. Sometimes, amateur photographers will request if they can shoot as guest photographers rather than official wedding photographers. That way, you get to practice wedding photography without the pressure of potentially messing up your friends’ photos.

You can also offer to do engagement shoots, which are essentially photos taken for the couple’s engagement announcement on social media. Whether you want to charge your loved ones at a discounted rate or offer your services for free is totally up to you!

Assist a Wedding Photographer

Hit up a professional wedding photographer based in your city and offer to tag along as an assistant or an apprentice. In doing the work, you can learn from your mentor by observing and asking questions, network at each wedding you attend, and build up a wedding photography portfolio over time.

What to Show in Your Wedding Photography Portfolio

So you’ve finally accumulated enough portfolio-worthy work to create your online wedding folio. Here are some things you should include:

Your Best Work. This makes up the heart of your photography portfolio. Choose about 15 to 20 photos from five to 10 weddings, organized neatly into galleries. Your chosen work should represent your brand and what you can consistently deliver as a wedding photographer. The selection should also be diverse—showcasing your ability to adapt to new settings, briefs, and requirements.

Background Information. Weddings are intimate affairs, so naturally, most couples want to establish connections with vendors they can trust. You don’t need to pretend to be the best wedding photographer of all time, you just need to be genuine and open enough so that more clients can connect with you as an artist and a person.

Testimonials. Oftentimes, wedding vendors get their clients through referrals. Again, it’s all about building relationships and establishing yourself as a trustworthy vendor. This is why it’s important to include testimonials in your photography portfolio.

A Blog. While not necessary to every photography website, a blog could be a great way for photographers to establish their brand and artistic philosophy in their online wedding photography portfolio. On a more practical note, a blog can be utilized to boost your search engine rankings through SEO. Be sure you can update your blog regularly though!

Package Prices. There is no general consensus about featuring rates on one’s website. Some photographers choose to be upfront about it, while others like to discuss them in private. One advantage of being upfront about rates is that it sets the expectations for couples.

Contact Details. Of course, don’t forget to include your contact information on your website, along with your location. Couples are usually looking for a photographer based in their locale or wherever their wedding will take place.

Wedding Photography Portfolio Examples

If you’re ready to build your portfolio website, now is the time to decide on a template. To help you out, we’ve put together a shortlist of templates on Format that complement wedding portfolios.

Dusk. With full-bleed images and a horizontal gallery, Dusk lets website visitors get lost in the magic of each photo.

Carousel. For traditionalists, this template’s classic slideshow gallery is simple and fuss-free.

Illuminate. With a grid homepage layout, visitors get a quick view of your featured weddings. Meanwhile, the horizontal scrolling gallery makes it easy to swipe through projects in one go.

Wedding Photography Portfolio FAQs

Six of your most frequently asked questions, answered.

The first step in starting a wedding photography portfolio is to build up a collection of portfolio-worthy photos. To get started, you can get in touch with vendors, shoot weddings for friends and family, or begin an apprenticeship under an established photographer. After some experience, you can create a folio featuring your best work.

A strong portfolio accomplishes three things. First, a great-looking website should establish your brand or forte as a photographer. Some photographers are successful at shooting intimate weddings, others thrive in grand celebrations—find your niche and make sure your portfolio could convey that message.

Next, a good portfolio website highlights your versatility. A client would not like to see the same photo twice, so be sure to pick only the best shots from each wedding you’ve covered and be mindful of anything that looks too similar.

Lastly, a good portfolio website should “sound” good too. Nice photos don’t seem to cut it—add captions to photos and a write-up for each gallery, explaining what went down and how you approached the project.

These days, creating digital photographers’ portfolios is easy. With a website builder like Format, you can make a web portfolio in no time. All you have to do is sign up, pick a theme that goes with your brand as a photographer and your photographic philosophy, upload your best photographs, organize each photo into galleries or pages, and customize your website to your liking.

When putting together their packages, photographers need to include details on the length of time to be covered, whether there will be assistants or a second photographer, a pre-nuptial photoshoot, and a storage option. For the latter, you could offer a flash drive, loose prints, or a bound album. If you shoot video too, you might want to create a separate package to include equipment, lights, editing, and the like.

You must have all the package inclusions listed on your portfolio website, along with the varying pricing options.

Practical questions aside, when scouting for wedding photographers, the one question you should always be asking is “what is your photography style?” To get the kinds of wedding photos you’ve always dreamed of, you need to find a photographer whose style is at par with your expectations.

Evaluating photographers involves assessing the following things: the quality of their photos, the number of weddings they’ve covered, the rate they offer, the style they value in photography, their professionalism, and their ability to plan for the weddings they shoot. While you can assess some of these factors at face value, there is no way to test for things like planning skills and professionalism.

To get a better idea of how your prospective photographer works, check out reviews and testimonials.

Create wedding photography portfolio

The Easiest and Best Way to Build a Wedding Photo Portfolio

It takes a lot of time and practice to build up a strong online wedding photography portfolio. But when it comes to actually building the website, there’s an easy option. Format is a website builder that can help you create a portfolio website in just six easy steps.

The website builder makes maintaining a website a piece of cake too, with options to customize your site and upload photos even from your phone. That way, you can just focus on the work of creating beautiful wedding photos.

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