Why Your Fashion Photography Portfolio Is The Backbone Of Your Career

It might seem obvious, but your portfolio is the backbone of your career. You could be the best “pitcher” in the world, know everything there is to know about sales and marketing, and be REALLY good at networking… but if your portfolio isn't strong enough, you're just not going to get booked for jobs.

I used to think that in order to progress and book clients, I needed to be shooting constantly - the more work I could churn out the better. I thought I needed to have new content to post every week!

This ended up being counter intuitive, because although I was shooting a lot of imagery, the work I was shooting wasn't always planned out well, it wasn't always my strongest imagery, and I ended up burning myself out. And guess what? This wasn’t helping me to book clients.

I was just wasting time and money.

The key to building a portfolio is to be intentional. You need to plan your portfolio shoots. To make them all truly your best work, and most importantly, make sure that you're filling any gaps that are present in your portfolio.

Once you begin to slow down, spend time planning your shoots, doing the research that you need to do, and arriving on set knowing what you’re going to create, you will not only end your shoot days with incredible imagery, but you’ll have work that you can use to pitch to clients, share on Instagram, post about on TikTok, and so much more.

The images for your portfolio are going to work hard for you, so you need to work hard to make them, too.