Once you have mastered your first concert, it's time to get your work seen by others. The only thing you should concentrate on in the beginning is building a portfolio. A portfolio is an overview of your best work. This has to be kick ass, your photos have to shine and keep people mesmerized. You definitely only want to show your keepers or shots you're really proud of. So go out and shoot five to 10 concerts with your 50 millimeter f point eight lens.

This will help you establish a working routine as a concert photographer. After two to three concerts you will be able to manage all the camera settings and you won't be as nervous anymore. You can concentrate on the band's stage performance which leads to better photos By following this advice, you'll be able to build up a portfolio with a variety of bands to show people. It can take two weeks, one month or longer. You decide your working speed. But the more often you practice in front of the stage, the better you will get.

Let's talk about the five most common mistakes when building your portfolio and how to avoid them. Mistake one mixture of different types of photos. Imagine you get in contact with a band manager and email him a link to your portfolio site. Because you don't only should concerts, but also senior portraits, weddings, some cats and newborns. you've packed it all onto one portfolio page. What do you think will happen when your contact visits your page?

He will leave immediately Why? People want to work with specialists. They are searching for people who have found a niche in which they're successful. I assume you would rather go to a car mechanic. If your car's broken down, then to a carpenter who repairs cars as a hobby. I often see people who mix the concert photos with the private family pictures.

This is definitely a no go. You might make a living as a wedding photographer and take concert photos for fun in the evenings. This isn't the problem at all. But you should separate your work based on subject. Have one web page for your wedding business and one for concerts, enabling you to send people to the appropriate specialized websites, which will make them see you as an expert. mistake to too many filters.

I often see portfolios that contain hundreds of photos. Sometimes they'll show five photos of the same singer in the same pose. I don't know why, but people tend to shy away to manipulate To Cinder portfolios, if you want to check out the new photographers homepage, would you want to see his best work? Or would you want to click hundred times to see his work? people on the internet are busy, and don't have the time to stay on a site for a long time searching for photos. Ask yourself, do you want to see 10 awesome and spectacular concert pictures, or hundred average shots of one concert.

I promise you, you will get bored after you've seen the lead singer in the same pose for the fifth time in a row. Your best photos should reflect the atmosphere of the concert and give the observer the feeling that he or she was there standing in the first row next to you. Therefore, I urge you to be a strict editor. This might sound hard in the beginning, but you need to learn to recognize your best work. I would suggest displaying only 20 to 30 30 of your best photos in your portfolio. If you want to show three pictures from the same concert, don't choose one, not more.

Showing two more photos from the same performance gives the impression that you don't have enough good ones to show and have just chosen these wants to fill up your portfolio. Mistake three portfolio on social media sites. Some people don't have their own homepage or portfolio site, but your social media sites such as Facebook fan pages, flicker, 500 pixels, behance, and so on instead. This might be the easiest way to show your work when you're just starting out. But there is a big downside to this. You don't have any control over these sites.

Facebook might change the policies and you'll have to pay a monthly fee for your fan page. Or even worse to just delete your profile. flickr might change to use it and sell your photos without your knowledge. You want to make sure that you are in full control, at least as far as that's possible on the internet. Therefore, the best option is to set up your own homepage. This also looks more professional than sending a music manager to your social media sites.

Mistake for portfolio is not responsive. iPhones, tablets, 13 inch laptops or 27 inch IMAX, you name it. Nowadays there is a huge variety of different ways to surf the internet. The key for your portfolio is to be responsive. Responsive means that your homepage always looks great. Whether you feed on a phone or a big cinema screen, as mobile devices are becoming more popular to browse the internet with, it's a must have.

If we go back to the example of the music manager, you can imagine that if he's using his iPhone, but just sees cropped photos and menu buttons which don't work on your homepage, he will leave and you won't get any response from him. Mistake five, forget to name your photos, people tend to forget to show a caption on the photos to show in the portfolio. If I click through a portfolio, I want to know which band I'm looking at. It's like hearing a great song in the radio. But the DJ doesn't tell you who it is the feeling of the name of the bands on the tip of my tongue, but they can't remember it freaks me out. So make sure your portfolio photos are named properly.

This also makes it easier for people to communicate with you and say, I love that shot of the pen name instead of I like the fifth photo in the third row. your portfolio will become your work permit. If you can show people good photos, you won't be hired. It's as simple as that. Concentrate on building the best portfolio. You can Can I portfolio pages also different from a blog post covering a concert, the portfolio page is often the first page that appears on a website.

This is the entry door for people into your world. I would suggest to show no more than 20 to 30 of your best concert photos on your portfolio page. This is how my portfolio page looks like. This portfolio page here has a simple design, and the aim of it is to show my best work in the shortest time possible. It's easy to navigate, and the pictures are named properly. If you write your own blog, and want to show an overview of a concert, I would suggest posting 10 to 15 of your best shots there.

Here is my blog post about the Metallica show in Vienna. Make sure to show different poses and band members. The same rule as mentioned above applies again. No one is interested in 50 photos of fun concert with 10 pics of A singer in the same pose, and honestly saying, it's really hard to get 50 awesome shots of one concert, I mostly ended up with about 15 to 20 good ones, including one too to keep us. Once you have your own website, you can easily send the link to magazines and blogs. If you're applying to work for them.

You can send your portfolio as a PDF to, but I think a link works better, as the editor is usually a busy person and doesn't want the hassle of downloading a PDF and saving it to his overcrowded desktop, only to lose it in the case homepage. I won't get into detail here, but I'd like to say a few words about getting your own homepage. I believe that nowadays you are screwed without an online presence. In the past, which I've heard from stories of all the photographers, it seems the world was spinning at another speed. You took your analog camera with To geeks, there were no restrictions like the three songs rule, and you got the right exposure by using a manual light meter. In the past concert photography was only really done by a few professional photographers.

Today, the digital revolution has brought photography into everyone's home, and the internet is the medium of our generation. I want to briefly touch the topic of why having your own homepage is key to being seen as a professional photographer. The most important point for me is having control over your work. You decide what gets uploaded when it goes online and who should see it. As discussed before, uploading your photos to your Facebook page might be easier. But you never know what the guys at Facebook headquarters will come up with next, and maybe they will decided to delete your profile tomorrow.

So an independent homepage to show your work is what you need and want Basically, you need a web domain and the webpage. The web domains for my project are www dot Mathias humbert.com and www dot how to become a rockstar photographer.com the best way is to use your own name. And it's not likely that someone has already taken that URL or domain name. If you want to use shooting the rock stars.com you will see that I purchased this for my course, and the domain is not available to anyone else anymore. I will discuss the topic about branding your business in the marketing module in more detail. For now, your name.com might be the easiest option.

And web space is the server you upload your photos and content to you can get one for as little as $1 per month and the shared server options probably the best choice when you're just starting out. This means that you share the server space with other people There are different options regarding the software to run on the server space you've purchased. If you don't want to spend too much money, you can set up WordPress, which is free. There are a ton of different so called themes you can choose from, and you will find good ones at market dot and beta.com. WordPress is what I use. But there are also others such as Squarespace.

To be honest, setting up a home page and building it is not easy and has already cost me quite a few years of frustration. For example, once you've installed a theme, you might decide that you don't want to have two photos at a certain position as defined by the template, but only one. If you don't know how to code, things can now start getting tricky. Therefore, I strongly suggest hiring someone who can help you set everything up. If you're on a budget, you can hire people from Fiverr or Upwork, known as oDesk. So let's have a quick look at fiber.

And let us search here for WordPress. And now you will you can see creatives who offer the work for a low price. Let's take care I will set up a WordPress theme exactly as demo. Hi, are you having trouble setting up your WordPress theme? Is it nothing like it was shown in the demo? Allow Kalki media to assist you in setting up your WordPress blog and site exactly is the demo with your content for just $5 only on Fiverr.

So you'll get the idea here, what it's all about. So you can order here for $5. You can see here, the reviews and also how many orders are in queue. So if you're on a budget fiber is a good starting point. point, I have good and bad experiences using post services. So sometimes what you get is what you pay for.

So don't expect too much from a $5 logo. If you have a budget to pay a professional graphic designer and developer, my logo is home which was designed by a graphic design and cost me $2,500 just for the design, so not including building the site. These costs can add up quickly. But remember, it's an investment in your career. Coming back to my portfolio page on music dot Mateus humber.com. Keep your homepage simple and clean and legible to speak for themselves.

Add an about page where you tell people about yourself in a few words, and the contact page where people can get in direct email contact with you. My concert portfolio homepage looks like this. The main reason in having this homepage is to be able to show it to editors of music magazines. managers and concert organizers. They are all busy people and have no time to click through 10 pages trying to find what they're looking for one additional hint. Don't use any advertisement on your page screaming, blaming, click hearing at the burger for free blame.

Believe me, it's not a good strategy and won't earn you any money. You want to build your showcase with your best photos. That's all. In the bonus section, I will share some reviews of real world portfolios so you can learn from it and use in your knowledge for building up your own homepage.