A well sorted portfolio

As a model, make-up artist, photographer or graphic artist your pictures speak for you. The question of how you should populate your portfolio portfolio and what content you should incorporate into it would thus be answered. In favor of the haptics you should do without a “virtual portfolio folder” and not appear with the tablet, but with a real folder made of cardboard with real photos made of paper at the appointment. A well-stocked and lovingly designed folder gives information about the seriousness of your work and shows your counterpart how much you value your own work and the cooperation of others.

After all, you don’t just present a simple picture on a photo, you present a lot of work in post-processing and exposure, a lot of patience in selecting the effects and thus all your skills and interests. As a model, photographer or make-up artist, the portfolio focuses on your personal specifications. A portfolio is the representation of your work and gives information about your personal style, the variety of your possibilities and the thoroughness in your profession. It stands for your own image, serves as illustrative and presentation material and provides the first impression.

Since there is no second chance for a first impression, you should pay a lot of attention to the design and development of the portfolio and use your portfolio to create a basis for future business relationships and orders. As far as design is concerned, you have a free hand and can decide for yourself how your first impression will look and how much you would like to reveal about yourself, your experience and diversity in your profession. It is recommended to use the portfolio folder to present all your skills and to get the chance for more and better paid orders.

Size and image selection

The portfolio folder is your staging of all skills and knowledge, all experiences and tasks in your profession. The more versatile and varied your portfolio, the more attention you will get from your counterpart and the better the job offers will be. For the size, or the amount of content of photographic portfolio folders there is no specific requirement. This gives you a free hand in the decision and weighting of personal accents.

We recommend a folder and a picture size in DIN A4, as its practical size makes it easy to transport and take with you to any appointment. While some pictures could also be meaningful and goal-oriented in DIN A5.

Care and protection

Protective films are an advantage, as your portfolio is passed through many hands and is presented at each appointment in the first meeting. To avoid fingerprints or grease stains in your portfolio, you should choose a special folder to leaf through and with included protective foils. Alternatively, you can design the folder yourself and buy individual sleeves if, for example, you are not sure about the amount and number of images in your presentations, or if you don’t want to exclude the possibility of expanding your portfolio. A simple yet modern design suggests your setting and is the best choice for portfolio folders.

Jessica Kobeissi: My Photographer Portfolio!

Fashion & Portrait photographer Jessica Kobeissi presents her portfolio of photographers and explains the structure, selection and design of the images.

Good lens for sports photography: What to look out for?

The autofocus must be able to focus on the subject quickly enough. In addition to the motor and the autofocus module in the camera, lenses also have their own autofocus motor. Cheap lenses from third-party manufacturers cannot match the engine performance of the Nikon and Canon originals. The lens otherwise creates a bottleneck that turns some promising shots into rejects.

The aperture and focal length requirements should be based on the sport, which doesn’t mean you need an arsenal of lenses. For owners of a Nikon camera, the AS-F lens is a real all-rounder. If a Canon or another model is used, a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens is the right choice. In principle, an aperture of f/4.0 only makes sense in bright daylight. For almost all other sports and applications, an aperture of f/2.8 should be selected. As a rule of thumb, the further away you are from the action, the higher the focal length should be.

Some lenses offer additional image stabilizers. These are not harmful, but are also not necessary. This feature is especially interesting if you want to drag the camera during car races to free the car from a blurred background. It is then particularly noticeable and conveys a moving motif. The image stabilizers support such ambitions and provide a concentrated view through a tilted viewfinder.

Settings for sports photography: Aperture, ISO & Co

Field and indoor sports in particular have different requirements. On the sports field, telephoto lenses are the right choice in good daylight. Usually you will sit far away from the action and still be able to get everything close. The aperture can be set to f/4.0, so no wide opening is required when shooting. This saves you a high ISO setting and gives you a sharper image. If you want to shoot very close scenes, you can start with a focal length of 24 mm. Normally you are well equipped from 70 mm on. With 400-500 mm you can overlook the playing field even behind the goal line up.

From 600 mm focal length it is difficult to achieve a good result. The situation is different when the super telephoto lens is used. If you record a scene from the edge of the field in the penalty area, 600 mm focal length is a good choice. However, this is more of an option for professional photographers who carry multiple cameras. For racing sports even 700 mm focal length can be necessary, if the own location is very far away from the events.

Phases in low light

In indoor sports, challenging lighting conditions prevail away from the professional leagues. Even a match under floodlight on the football field can deliver valuable results in the recording quality with f/4.0 aperture. In poorly lit sports halls, you can’t get around aperture f/2.8. The shutter opens further and more light penetrates the sensor in a short time. This is where autofocus comes in again.

In addition, an image sensor (in the camera) that delivers good images at high ISO values helps. The image noise should not be processed in the camera, because the quality suffers from it. The camera only calculates internally which color pixels would be suitable at this point. If there’s such a powerful image sensor behind the lens, you don’t need to worry about f/2.8 apertures. If this is not the case or if you want to achieve absolutely high-quality results, a lens with an aperture of f/2.0 and a focal length of 200 mm is a good alternative. Generally, focal lengths in indoor sports start at 24 mm. For shots of the opponent’s half of the game, a focal length of up to 400 mm is helpful.

Polfilter: How do they work?

Light is an electromagnetic wave. These waves run in different inclined planes. Draw a light wave on a sheet of paper for illustration. Then take the sheet in your hand and rotate it by any angle around the longitudinal axis of the light wave. The leaf is the plane in which the shaft moves, the rotation around the longitudinal axis indicates the different inclination of this plane.

The normal light with which we photograph outside and inside moves in numerous planes (polarization planes) that are inclined differently from each other. A polarizing filter is now a tiny grid that allows only waves whose vibrational planes are oriented parallel to the grid bars to pass through. Just as a key fits into a lock in just one orientation. If you even turn the key 2 degrees to the left or right, it will no longer go into the lock. In order to be able to filter all vibration levels, polarizing filters are always mounted rotatably in front of the lens.

Normal light is depolarized, i.e. all inclination angles occur in approximately equal proportions. A polarizing filter is therefore always used when the individual polarization planes are occupied to varying degrees by individual light components. For example in reflections, rainbows, foliage and blue skies.

Polfilter: What do you use it for?

In product photography in particular, reflections are usually undesirable. Reflective surfaces such as those found in cars or highly polished furniture should be free of any reflections in the catalogue. The use of a polarizing filter is almost inevitable there. If necessary, reflections on water surfaces can also be reduced in landscape photography, but there they are mostly desired.

With a polarizing filter the sky can be darkened and the clouds can be modelled out more clearly. For this purpose, the polarizing filter must be correctly aligned according to the position of the sun. With very wide-angle lenses, the effect may increase towards the edges. You need to keep an eye on that while you work.
The leaf green can also be reproduced more richly and clearly with a polarizing filter, as can a rainbow, which is more effective in front of a sky darkened by the polarizing filter.

Working with the polarizing filter requires some practice. It is not always easy to align it correctly so that the picture does not lose its naturalness. Also keep in mind that the polarizing filter simply filters out light and you have to adjust the exposure time accordingly. Use a tripod if necessary. In addition, the polarizing filter – like any other filter – also influences the image quality as an additional element in the optics. The polarizing filter is to be regarded as a special tool of which you really need to know exactly how it works and how it works. Therefore, frequent trial and error is a must.

Result: A useful tool for product and landscape photography

The polarizing filter is a useful tool especially in product photography, where especially reflections are absolutely undesirable. But it can also be used in landscape photography, for example to make a rainbow more striking or to make the greenery of the leaves appear richer. It is a special tool whose handling must have been tried out and practiced many times.

Sort out photos

Those who have taken photos all day long are usually still so overwhelmed by what they have experienced that they lack a clear view of their own work. Therefore, the evaluation of the daily result should only be started when the right concentration is available. This may be the only way for a photographer to discover a hidden treasure that would have been overlooked in the rush. However, when it comes to the evaluation, the scale should be set one number higher if the photographer wants to develop further. Sure, if you want to keep a so-la-la photo, you should do it. However, an ambitious photographer is not satisfied with it, but strives for perfection and those who get used to keeping only the really good photos will get a smaller photo collection, but of promising quality.

After selecting the good photos that are worth saving, the photographer should bypass saving them. For amateur photographers, it is worth taking a laptop with them so that they can conveniently evaluate, save and possibly already edit the photos. There are several other ways to store a large photo collection, but even here there are pitfalls and small errors or accidents can quickly lead to a complete loss of all data. Photo files for professionals that are stored in RAW format, for example, can be between 20-30 MB in size and therefore require a huge amount of storage space. Demand will multiply rather than stagnate in the future.

Data backup in the cloud

If you store your images on your laptop, you should store them in the cloud again as a precaution. And, even if this is perhaps an expensive method, since each storage space costs money, the triple backup of the photos is even more secure than stored twice. There are several providers that provide a photographer with storage space in the cloud, which usually costs you a few euros a month. Some of these providers have Photoshop as an image processing program including storage space as an offer, which proves to be practical for some.

One advantage of storing photos in the cloud is that you can access them anytime, anywhere. The disadvantage is the lack of security from hackers, but that’s up to you. For data backup instead of a memory card, an external hard disk is also a good choice, as it has proven to be quite robust and offers a huge amount of storage space. In addition to the large storage space, it is also important to radically separate from the unusable motifs after evaluating the photo series. It’s best to keep only the photos you want to see in ten years’ time.

Especially when travelling, a photographer has only limited resources available and these should either be used optimally or the problem of large storage space should be solved before starting the journey. The vacationer can store all data simply on his laptop, but with theft or other loss, the whole trouble was free. If you think you can save your holiday photos on a simple memory card, you will be surprised how quickly such a small thing can get lost or become unusable due to slight damage. In principle, it is recommended to save the data records of the photos not only once, but twice.

The Cloud simply explained

You didn’t understand what the Cloud was all about? This video explains what it’s all about and how it works in less than 20 minutes. Nowadays, almost everyone only takes photos with their mobile phone. But hardly anyone has the storage space needed for this. The cloud is just an advantage for you to keep an eye on everything and save money.