Quickstart Guides

About the guides

Go in-depth using these step-by-step guides to doing hard things. These guides don’t assume you know anything. They’ll tell you how to do everything you need to know to get up-to-speed with the technology you need to make your business soar.

How To Create A Photography Portfolio

Whether you’re a beginner, amateur or expert photographer, displaying your work is the end goal. Even if you’re a beginner or amateur, you will want to show people the work you are most proud of. Sure, you might think, “Well, it’s just for family or friends so understanding how to build a portfolio is outside the scope of what I’ll need to know. I just want to share my images on Flickr, Facebook or 500px.” Okay, well let me ask you this. How will you know which images are your best?

Knowing how to build a portfolio is so much more than getting some photos together so you can book a job. It’s about curating the best version of you, your brand and your work. It took me a really long time to create a photography portfolio I’m proud of. I still change it regularly as I take new photos and discover changes in my artistic style.

This Quickstart will teach you how to assess your work and options for displaying it in a high quality way that compliments your best work. I’ll dissect my own portfolios across multiple genres and show you how to establish your own including visual identity, portfolio mediums and how to take advantage of website features so your work doesn’t compete with external design.

How we’ll create your portfolio

At a high level, we will go through:

1. Why you should build a photography portfolio
2. Why you should build a portfolio
3. What your photography portfolio needs to include
4. How to define your vision for your work
5. How to develop your portfolio
6. How to give your photography portfolio personality
7. How to build your portfolio and bring it to life
8. How often you should review your portfolio

How To Get Started With Adobe Lightroom Classic

I wrote this free online photography course for learning Adobe Lightroom because it’s important to understand the basics if you want to use the Lightroom presets you’ve downloaded. A lot of these chapters are not required to take advantage of the Lightroom presets, but learning Lightroom makes you a more effective photographer, and reduces your editing time dramatically.

Why bother learning Lightroom?

I’ve written the online photography course in a way that makes sense to you. When I first started photography, it was really difficult to figure out where to start. As I spent more time taking photos, I quickly learned it was the photo editing that made the biggest difference to my work. I thought that all you needed to make a good photo was a good camera, a little bit of sharpening and increased colour saturation. Lightroom can do that, but it is so much more than that. It’s a photo catalogue, an editing suite and becomes your third arm with photography.

Is a copy of Adobe Lightroom all I need?

Yep! A few of my best Lightroom Presets wouldn’t hurt either! But if you are just wanting to learn how to make your photos amazing with Adobe Lightroom, a copy of the program is all you need. It comes on Windows and Mac, so take your pick.

What you’ll learn

1. About Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic
2. What is Lightroom?
   1. Organising Your Pictures
   2. Modifying Your Images
   3. Exporting Your Pictures
3. What makes Lightroom different from other software applications?
4. The Lightroom Classic catalogue
   1. What is the Lightroom catalogue?
5. Importing photos into Lightroom
   1. How to import photos into Adobe Lightroom
   2. The left-hand side
   3. Import types
   4. The right-hand side
   5. File Handling
   6. File Renaming
   7. Apply During Import
6. Exporting and importing Lightroom catalogues
   1. Exporting your Lightroom catalogue
   2. The exported files
   3. Importing the catalogue
   4. The finished product
7. How to add location information in Lightroom
   1. Using the map
   2. Adding the location to images
   3. Adding the finishing touches
   4. Reap the benefits

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How To do EDM Marketing

What is EDM Marketing? This guide answers that and also tells you how to do it (properly). We’ll go through what EDM marketing is, how you can use it to get more eyes on your creative works, what EDM software is out there and the steps to take in setting up an effective campaign.

What you’ll learn