William Neill - The Photographers Portfolio Development Workshop: Learn to Think in Themes, Find Your Passion, Develop Depth, and Edit Tightly

This book requires you to be an active participantit is a workshop in book form, not a book to be read through cover-to-cover in one sitting. In order to get the most out of the lessons that follow, you will need to put in the work. Just as you will not get fit simply by reading a book about fitness, you will not reap the full benefits of these lessons without actively engaging with the process and doing your best to complete the assignments. I will guide you through this process and share insights I have gained through years of personal practice and teaching workshops, and as you complete the assignments, you will develop your own thoughts and processes that can be practiced again and again. Simply put, the true value here is the time and effort that you commit to developing your portfolio.

These lessons were originally written for an eight-week online course. Although that course had a weekly progression of lessons, assignments, and feedback from the instructor, this workshop can easily be followed in a similar manner. I suggest setting up a schedule of reading each lesson, completing the assignment, and then critiquing your successes and deficiencies. Even though we are continuously self-critiquing our progress, this schedule provides you with a structure and perhaps a limited timeframe that will improve your progress. Of course, you can be flexible regarding time with these lessons, but you may see more growth with a schedule.

Here is a basic outline of the objectives for each lesson:

Lesson One: Learn what you have.

Lesson Two: Edit for two favorite themes.

Lesson Three: Photograph new images for one of those two themes.

Lesson Four: Begin learning the process of building a theme from past and new images (making new work is always encouraged in each lesson).

Lessons Five & Six: Practice what youve learned so far to build skill.

Lesson Seven: Discover ideas and resources for sharing your portfolios.

Lesson Eight: Complete and realize your photographic vision and passion.

Another approach to the assessment process after completing each assignment would be to enlist a fellow photo friend or a pro you respect to help you judge each assignment. You could share your work on Zoom or via another sharing method to get feedback.

By either method, you can take the feedback and apply what youve learned to the next lesson. You may see an issue with image quality, or discover a theme direction you hadnt keyed in on before that informs your next effort.

REPETITION: You may begin to notice that there is some repetition in the exercises we will complete throughout this book/ workshop. This is deliberatetrue growth comes from practice, so many exercises need to be repeated as you continue to refine your images and your portfolio.

I use Adobe Lightroom to access my photographic library and for some of my image processing. A major asset in Lightroom is the Collection module, which I use extensively to organize my photographs. I have dozens of collections and smart collections, some focused on specific projects, long-standing themes, and some based on ideas I have for future bodies of work. Some of those seedling ideas go nowhere, and some take root to form important bodies of work. Adobe Bridge has a similar Collections function. I also use Smart Collections to organize my images by rating, keyword, or chronologically by day, month, or year.

The curation process starts with downloading my digital files into Lightroom. Before I click on the Import button, I add keywords that are important for searching for specific photographs later on. As I edit, I rate them on both technical qualities and aesthetics. Both rating and keywording help me during each future editing session to be more efficient. I can go to a group of images in Folders or Collections and more easily pick up where I left off.

NOTE: In the context of this book, the words edit and editing refer to the process of refining a selection of photographs, not the post-processing of a single image. I will also use the words curate or curation to mean the selection, organization, and presentation of a collection of images.

When I am working in Lightroom, I often think of what Collection a photograph might fit in. In both my editing and field sessions, the theme ideas help funnel photos into my Collections. Each new photo session often has a few images that will build depth for that theme.

This workshop does focus on curation, but I also give you direction on how to build up depth in your portfolio themes. The process can take a short time, like my Antarctica portfolio, which was created in five days of intensive shooting. Or it can take decades, like my Yosemite portfolio that was created over forty-five years of living in or near the park.