Photography Portfolios

In this episode, Antonio, Dave and Jacob Lucas discuss the news, answer some questions from listeners and discuss how they go about building and maintaining a photography portfolio. How do we define a portfolio and what do we intend it for? How often should you update the work in the portfolio and how should you go about deciding exactly what goes in and what stays out?

• Portfolio building advice from Zack Arias.

In the news this week, rumors of the upcoming release of Adobe Lightroom 6, Lytro’s finances and plans to move into virtual reality and movies, Getty Images’ cash-flow woes, Serif Affinity, a new, low cost image editor with Photoshop in its sights, and that blue and black (or was it white and gold?) dress.

Information related to listener questions

Mark asked about whether welders’ glass would be suitable for use in shooting the upcoming solar eclipse. No-one on the panel had looked into this but it was felt that it would likely introduce unpleasant distortions in the photos and may not be dark enough to use safely. Regardless, our advice was NEVER to use the viewfinder to focus when shooting into the sun. Poke the lens through a hole in the center of a large card or sheet of thick paper and use as much neutral density filtration as you can in front of the lens. ALWAYS use live view to focus.

This picture was taken by Dave a couple of years ago using a 10-stop ND filter stacked with a polarizer (12 stops of density in total) and a 400mm lens on a crop sensor body.

An image of the sun showing the planet Venus in transit. (c) 2012 Dave Wilson

Some more advice on shooting solar eclipses:

• Nikon – How to Photograph a Solar Eclipse
• Photography Life – How to Photograph a Solar Eclipse.
• Space.com – How to Safely Photograph the “Ring of Fire.”

Selected from the Web

• Antonio and Dave: “Behind Photographs” by Tim Mantoani. Portraits of photographers with their most famous images.
  Jacob: The Photo Frontier #WE35 Project. A year-long project involving a group of photobloggers exploring the versatility of the humble 35mm lens.