QUICK TIPS

Your booking email is a portfolio tool, and almost nobody uses it as one.

Somebody deciding whether to book you is going through your gallery looking for their own situation in it, twins when all 10 frames are one sleeping baby on a cream blanket, or a family that looks nothing like the one family you keep showing, and when they can't find themselves anywhere on that page they go quiet and you never find out why.

The frames that would have covered them usually aren't sitting in a folder waiting to be culled. They were never shot, because nobody planned for them.

So plan for them, with a line in the booking email a week out along the lines of "I'll take a few with you both in the frame as well, so wear something you'd be happy to be photographed in." That gets a yes most of the time, since they're already working out what to wear anyway, and it lands far better there than as a request made on the day while somebody is holding a newborn and everyone in the room is tired 😅.

Although before you plan anything, go back through your last few galleries, because I did this with a client this week and a decent chunk of what they needed already existed, sitting in sessions that had thrown off a parent's hands in shot or a sibling wandering in without anyone asking for it.

Which situation do your clients keep turning up with that your portfolio still doesn't show?

A pet photographer told me this week that a coaching call had talked them out of mentioning their accreditation at all.

The advice was that "award-winning" is worthless because everybody says it, and on the phrase itself that's completely right. Anyone can type those two words and very nearly everyone has, which is why a buyer's eye goes straight past the line without stopping.

But they had gone a step further than the advice did and decided the credential was the problem, and it isn't. A bronze at a regional print competition is an award, and so is a national master's title that takes years of judged submissions to earn, and both of them arrive on a homepage as the same two words with nothing to separate one from the other. It was the wording that failed, not the thing standing behind it.

So write out what you actually won, with the name of the body and the level and the year on it. It reads duller and takes up about four times the room, and anyone who cares to can go and check every part of it, which almost nobody ever does, and that is roughly why it works 🤷.

Then have a look at where it's sitting. Theirs was down in the footer under the copyright line, doing nothing for anybody.

What did you actually win, in the words you'd use if a client asked you about it face to face?