There are only a select few truly universal things that every photographer must have. While you may think of the obvious, such as cameras, lenses, bags, and other kit, we won’t talk about any of these in this particular article. Instead, we will talk more about a service that every photographer must use in order to be a real pro.

What does it mean to be a professional photographer in 2023? Well, many things. Being in touch with the current zeitgeist, fulfilling the demands of modern clients, and so on. One of those things that a photographer needs now is a website. Before going further, I want to say that I am not paid by any particular platform to write this article. I pay for these services myself and had a website long before starting to write for Fstoppers.

In this article, I want to give reasons why you must have a website as a professional photographer in 2023 and why you can’t simply send an Instagram link as a website. Moreover, I will share some tips on how to build a good website that clients have no trouble navigating.

Why Have a Website in 2023?

First and foremost, a website is a place to showcase your work. It allows you to curate a selection of images, control how the viewer sees them, and really let your work shine. There is a simplicity that a website creates, which provides your viewer with a clear and comprehensive view of everything that there is to display. The ability to constantly edit the images you present ensures that your portfolio is updated and relevant. Unlike social media, a website provides a cleaner look and gives you control over what you display in what order. What is more, if you are shooting in several genres, you can divide the website to suit this need as well. That is simply impossible on a single Instagram account.

Another reason to have a website is that it elevates your professional image. It is expected that a photographer has a website in 2023 if they are planning to work with clients. Every time I speak to someone in person, they usually ask for my website rather than Instagram. An established web presence is a valuable marketing tool for a photographer.

Why Is Instagram Not Good Enough?

Instagram is another valuable tool that you must have as a photographer. However, it serves a very different purpose when compared to a website. Instagram is a place to show that you are actively working and posting new content regularly. It is a place that is not so much your portfolio as it is just a blog or a feed of what you’ve been up to. It is less professional and more personal than a website. Sure, Instagram is going to be much more frequently visited than your website, but it is not a valid digital presence on its own. An Instagram is going to attract all sorts of people, whereas your website is going to be more targeted. That audience might very well be potential clients and industry professionals. Having an Instagram allows you to build a following, while having a website will convert into more jobs.

How to Build a Good Website

I will be honest: standing out by having a fancy website is probably a bad move. Let your work speak for itself, not the website on which the work is presented. The importance of having an easy-to-navigate website can’t be underestimated. I see far too many photographers make a complicated website that is impossible to use. To add insult to injury, they put in a contact form, which will keep most clients from ever reaching out. Here is my guide to building a good website.

Platform

First things first: picking a platform, I tried a few on the market, including Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly. I ended up using Squarespace, as it is the best out of the three. Sure, they are notorious for their marketing and are pretty much everywhere, but honestly, they provide a great service at a reasonable cost, so it only makes sense to use them. My experience with Squarespace has been largely positive. It is very easy to build a website; I made mine in about an hour. The whole interface is super clean, the blocks are easily customized, and you really don’t need any previous experience with web design. All this adds up to a fantastic-looking website and a great backend experience.

Design

Now, how do you make a great website that clients can easily navigate? My website is built to be simple. I follow the KISS method: keep it simple, stupid. Essentially, it contains some galleries that show my work, an about page, and a contact page. The portfolio is the homepage, and all the work is visible at once. You can go on it and immediately see what I do and how I do it. There is no entry page, no galleries to click—literally nothing that the client has to do in order to see my work. This way, I am able to immediately get down to business and avoid the annoyance of having the potential client scroll through menus and find what they need. I’ve known cases where clients will skip a photographer if their website is too complicated to navigate.

About and Contact

The other thing that is important is contacting you. It has to be easy and obvious. This is why having a dedicated “Contact Me” page is so vital to having a good website. I have my contact information on both the about and contact pages. This eliminates the slight chance that a client won’t know where to find the contact information. Don’t hide it; keep it simple and obvious. The other thing that you need to have is an email and a phone number that is clearly visible on your website. Contact forms might seem like a good choice at first, but they are both impersonal and annoying to fill out. It is much easier and faster to have a “mailto: youremail@email.com” link. Whenever I fill out a contact form, I usually don’t even expect the person to get back to me, as it feels like a shot in the dark.

The about page should also be short and to the point. Don’t open with an “I loved photography since childhood.” While it might be true, nobody wants to read your life story. I suggest keeping your about section to information on what describes your work, some clients you worked for, and maybe a quick question and answer about you. I am currently adding one that shares some private info such as my guilty pleasure, etc. Such information can help you quickly build a personal connection. For example, I love Family Guy. If my client also likes Family Guy, there’s a topic to talk about right from a sentence on your website.

Closing Thoughts

So, there you have it. Here is why you need a website and how to build an easy-to-use website that your clients will love. Every working photographer must have a website in 2023. There is no excuse for you to not have one.

If you want me to review your website and provide feedback, feel free to get in touch via email at illya@illyaovchar.com!

“Women in Music,” the new exhibit currently running in the Femme X Columbia gallery on Richland Street through July, is a classic example of how evocative photography can come to define a music scene.

The collection, the work of photographer and concept artist Kati Baldwin, showcases its own artistic vision even as it highlights the work of others, playfully interacting with the natural shadows and darkness while also making liberal use of saturation and other effects to create its own visual language across the various subjects, all of whom are, of course, women.

“I love showcasing other people’s art — it’s a lot easier to do that than for other people than to do it for myself,” Baldwin said. “I like connecting with people and learning about their personality and then creating a visual off of it.”

Baldwin, who first got into photography when she was working as a retail manager at the alternative clothing store Sid & Nancy in Five Points, said she first began documenting the local music scene with a few bands she knew, but quickly started getting encouraged to do more, starting with David Stringer’s SceneSC website in 2017.

“He asked me to shoot two shows in one weekend, and that’s how I shot my first two shows,” she said, one of which was for the acclaimed indie rock band Spoon.

“I’d never heard of Spoon at the time, so that was a really cool experience to see them and hear them listen for the first time while shooting. That’s when I realized I want to do music photography, that it sounded fun.”

As far as developing her style, Baldwin said it’s a combination of technical choices as well as aesthetic ones.

“If I’m not using flash, I really like to bump up the contrast a lot in post edit. I’ll make the blacks really, really black and actually usually toned down the whites a lot,” she explained. “But if I am using flash I can get more creative, like doing really long exposures. That’s how I can do things like my light trails.”

She also quickly developed different presets for particular color themes that she wanted to explore, going so far as to name them after venues (like the rock club New Brookland Tavern) or specific artists that’s she’s worked with.

“I just love being a part of a community and letting people that you know, what they’re doing is being seen,” she said of her continued passion for music photography, particularly local women musicians. “I love boosting egos and just making people feel good about their talents.”

The new exhibit was a big moment for Baldwin in more ways than one — as a struggling artist relatively new to photography, this is only her second exhibition and the first in four years. And she also got to add her passion for event planning into the mix for the opening reception back in May, booking Greenville singer/songwriter Darby Wilcox, Spartanburg’s Slow Funeral and local singer/songwriter Kat Gandy to perform.

“I’ve never really had the means to do (something like this) until recently,” she said, noting more regular freelancing gigs combined with assisting commercial studio photographers such as George Fulton and Sandy Andrews has put her in a position to spend the time and energy to put something like this show together.

“It’s kind of scary to invest a lot of money when you don’t know if anyone’s gonna buy your work. But I think it’s worth it.”

When you think of landscape photography, you most likely imagine doing it during golden hour, with dramatic rays of sunshine cascading across the scene. However, you can create compelling landscape images at any hour, even during the night. This awesome video tutorial will give you a ton of practical advice for tackling nighttime landscape photography and producing eye-catching shots. 

Coming to you from Alister Benn of Expressive Photography, this excellent video tutorial will show how to take great nighttime landscape photos. While planning ahead is quite important in regular landscape work, it becomes doubly so when you start doing it at night. First, simply having much less visibility means finding the right location for a shot is trickier, so having your destination planned in advance is a major advantage that will save you a lot of time and effort. Second, working at night is more dangerous, and knowing your route will make for a safer trip. Be sure you take all the other necessary safety precautions as well. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Benn. 

And if you really want to dive into landscape photography, check out “Photographing The World 1: Landscape Photography and Post-Processing with Elia Locardi.” 

In case you never heard of it: The bullet time effect has been around for a while, but became really famous when it was popularized with the movie “The Matrix” from 1999.

While it can easily be recreated in purely rendered form like animated movies or video games, it is still quite involved and costly to achieve with real cameras: You set up an array of photo cameras, trigger them all simultaneously and play back the individual photos as frames of a video. The result is that the scene seems to be frozen in time while the camera moves around freely.

When I said that the bullet time effect is still expensive, I have to admit that it has become much cheaper since 1999. I looked for old used DSLRs. They have large (albeit old) sensors, they support means to remotely trigger the shutter, they have plenty of resolution, their settings can be controlled precisely and nobody except me is interested in them anymore. The trick is that we are using the photo mode of these old DSLRs to create a video, which means that we are comparing old photo specs with modern video specs. So, I looked for the oldest mainstream beginner DSLR that has a decent resolution and picked the Canon EOS 400D from 2006.

See the video below and more here. The code is on GitHub.

Street photography: it’s the act of documenting the world around you as it happens in a public setting. These days, some of the best street photography is done when displaying the current state of humanity or sometimes by simply looking at people as fixtures of urban geometry. The Panasonic S5 II is a positively incredible camera for a host of needs that photographers have — including street photography. With a full-frame sensor that performs impeccably at high ISOs and a secret weapon inside, there’s a lot to love here.

This piece is presented in partnership with Panasonic. We’ve independently and ethically reviewed all the products in this post already without sponsorship. And we worked with them to recommend a few key gems to you.

The Best Gear for Street Photography with the Panasonic S5 II

Some of our recommendations for the best gear to use with the Panasonic S5 II (buy one here) for street photography are:

• Panasonic 50mm f1.8 Lumix S: Small, weather resistant, and packing fantastic image quality. The 50mm field of view is what so many famous street photographers have chosen over the years. You can put a bit more distance between you and your subject when you use this lens. Check out our full review of this lens.
• Panasonic 35mm f1.8 Lumix S: All the benefits of the 50mm f1.8 but with a wider field of view. We recommend you get a bit closer with this lens. Check out our full review of this lens. Always remember that weather-resistance helps with a bunch of other factors like keeping your camera’s sensor clean and the overall reliability of the product.
• Panasonic 24mm f1.8 Lumix S: Best for when you want to tell a more environmental story with all the benefits of the other lenses we spoke of. Check out our full review of this lens. To make sure that your autofocus is always snappy, make sure to use isopropyl alcohol to clean the lens contacts and camera contacts.

These three focal lengths are some of the most common options for street photography. Lucky for us, the Panasonic S5 II uses the Leica L mount. One of the really awesome things about this mount is the large variety of lens options you’ve got available to you. Not only can you adapt some beautiful vintage lenses, but notable lens manufacturers also make lenses for Leica L mount. This lets you stay versatile and create a whole host of different looks.

If you really must use autofocus though, then know that thanks to the previous firmware updates, the S5 (and now the S5 II) are good for street photography. You can also use other camera tricks like the quick-AF feature and more. We’ve got an entire article on getting more from the Panasonic S5 II’s autofocus right here.

Believe it or not, this is really all you need to get started. So let’s dive deeper into how to use the gear.

All About Zone Focusing

Sure, the Panasonic S5 II has autofocus; and in the continuous focus setting it can do a good job. But one of the fantastic things about the S5 II that so many photographers have asked for is better focus peaking in manual focus mode. The video shooters have known about this for years, and lots of other photographers don’t really pay it any mind. But it’s a legitimate feature. When enabled, focus peaking highlights and puts little lines around whatever is in focus within the scene. One of the reasons we’re highly recommending Panasonic’s lenses is the full lens and camera communication. This means that you’ll get the most accurate focusing possible.

Now all you have to do is use what’s called zone focusing. Zone focusing is the act of stopping a lens down and focusing it away to a certain distance. The laws of physics state that the further out you focus a lens, the more of the scene will be in focus at a given aperture. With zone focusing, it’s often a splendid idea to stop the lens down to around f5.6 to 8 and focus maybe 5 to 6 feet away. The Panasonic S5 II and the lenses we’re using are bound to get something in focus from 8 to 4 feet away because the lens is stopped down.

Here are a few other tips:

• Don’t let the camera go to sleep, otherwise, you could miss the shot
• You don’t need to use the viewfinder for this. This lets you shoot in any way you can creatively think of. Lots of people just understand what the field of view looks like, move to their subject, and just shoot.
• Because you’re focused a certain distance away, your subjects are bound to be in focus with zone focusing
• Shoot in continuous burst mode. You don’t need to shoot at a high burst rate. Just in case, the Panasonic S5 II can shoot up to 30 frames a second. And you can see what it’s capable of doing in our full review of the camera. Our reviews aren’t sponsored, so keep that in mind when you’re reading.

With time, zone focusing will be one of the best things you do.

Make it Look Like Film!

Now here’s the Panasonic S5 II’s secret weapon: Real Time LUT. You can load video and movie Look Up Tables onto the camera to make the image quality look like 35mm and 120 film. Alternatively, you can use Panasonic’s own looks like L Classic Monochrome to get a nice black and white look.

Note that Real Time LUT only applies to the JPEG photo. So we recommend shooting in RAW + JPEG. However, most of the time, we don’t even end up using the RAWs we shot because we’re so happy with the JPEG results. Crazy, right?

As you’re shooting, keep in mind the ideas around zone focusing. Remember how far away the camera is focusing as you’re walking around. When doing that, all you’re going to have to do is focus on the composition of the scene. You won’t even need to autofocus! And with how small, lightweight, and durable the Panasonic S5 II is with any of these lenses, you’ll want to shoot all the time.

Enthusiasts can benefit a lot from surrounding themselves with like-minded people. It helps them fuel each other’s passion for the craft and continue to get better at it.

The Facebook group ‘Minimalist Photography’ is a perfect example of such a place. It embraces both classical minimalism and post-minimalism, or the so-called artistic (or conceptual) minimalism, and invites people to share their works.

“We look for uncluttered artistic images of quality and originality,” the team running the group writes in its ‘About’ section.

Founded all the way back in March 2005, the community now unites 285K members. “We have evolved [our] rules over several years and they seem to work to keep the timeline focused on the artwork and the room a civil, respectful, and enlightening place.”

Continue scrolling to check out our hand-picked collection of some of the group’s most popular images.

I don’t know how much time you spend looking back through your photo library. I can’t say I do it very much, unless I need to go back in time to track down a very specific photo. But I’ve currently got Google Photos installed on my iPhone, and Google Photos is very aggressive when it comes to notifications, particularly when it comes to photos taken long ago.

It was one such notification that caught my eye — Google Photos calling out a photo I had taken 18 years ago. I’m used to having old photos surface on my iPhone — i’ve even set up a widget on my home screen that shows images of my daughter from my Photos library. But those images are usually a year or two old. Here was Google Photos, serving up an image that was old enough to vote.

That was when it hit me — I’ve been taking digital photos for two decades now. And going back through my photo library reveled not just memories of old trips and family get-togethers. It showed me how far cameras have come in the last 20 years and why today’s best camera phones truly impress.

The oldest shots in my Google Photos library date back to 2002. They came from a Canon PowerShot S200, the first digital camera I ever bought. Yes, kids, back in those days, if you wanted a camera close at hand, you had to buy one separately. The Canon PowerShot S200 delivered a 2MP camera packed into a not exactly svelte 3.4 s 2.2 x 1.1-inch body that I remember not fitting into my pocket particularly comfortably. But it did the job.

Or at least, it did the job as well as a point-and-shoot camera could in 2002. The above picture of my and my wife in Kauai is decent enough, but you can really see the limits of 2002-era photography. The scene is horribly backlit — you can’t make out much of the background at all. And you’d have a hard time picking us out of the shadows as well.

I can’t help but wonder what advances in computational photography over the ensuing two decades might have done for that photo. I could have used something like Apple’s Smart HDR, which combines different exposures to call out more detail in a shot, particularly in photos where there’s a lot of contrast between light and dark areas. With more advanced photo processing, my wife and I may not looked so murky and maybe some of the background wouldn’t have been so over-exposed.

On that same trip, I took a photo of the Na Pali coast from the vantage point of a heiicoptor cockpit. It’s a decent-enough photo in that I capture a view you can only see from the air or sea, but the challenge of shooting through a window on a not especially clear day proved too much for a 2002-era camera. Better photo-processing aided by AI would have probably cleaned up that photo considerably.

Any older shot in my Photos library that I took at night had me immediately longing for a night mode that managed to call out more detail in low-light photos. Once again with my trusty PowerShot by my side, I captured the final score of a rare University of California win over a hated film school from down south as darkness fell on the Berkeley hills. Thank goodness for the lights on the scoreboard, because that’s the only thing that allowed me to capture the moment. 

The 2003-era advertisements lining the scoreboard are all but impossible to see. (A shame since that ad for the company Cingular makes me feel like there’s a bright future ahead for that outfit.) A night mode might have helped out — or at least a dedicated telephoto lens with an optical zoom.

Just so that we don’t pick on 20-year-old Canon point-and-shoots, let’s turn our attention to some early smartphones to look at how their photographic output held up. The answer? Not very well.

This 13-year-old shot of my nephew clutching his favorite pet chicken was taken  by an iPhone 3G. Yes, neither 6-year-olds nor chickens are known for their ability to hold still while uncles fumble with their smartphones, but this picture is remarkably blurry. I’m guessing whatever merits the iPhone 3G’s 2MP camera brought to the table, image stabilization wasn’t one of them.

The irony, of course, is that if I were viewing this photo on a Pixel 7 and not an iPhone 12, I might be able to clean it up with the help of the Tensor G2-powered Photo Unblur feature. Just for grins, let’s see what happens when we try the Photo Unblur feature using a Pixel 7a.

You know what? That’s a lot cleaner. And it certainly helps underscore the point that there have been a lot of advances in mobile photography over the past 20 years when even a midrange phone from 2023 can take a 2010 photo and make it look a lot better.

Spend some time looking at older images in your photo library, and you really come to appreciate what phone makers have done in the era of the smartphone. Certainly, increasing the megapixels has helped — I’m trying to imagine the reception Tim Cook would get if he unveiled an iPhone with the iPhone 3G’s 2MP sensor. But wider apertures that let in more light, bigger sensors that capture more detail and optical image stabilization that steadies even the shakiest hand play a big role, too.

I don’t look at those old photos in my library and despair at their quality — memories are memories and the photos I have represent the best technology I had available at the time. But I do see some of those old photos and appreciate what I have at my disposal now. It’s pretty amazing what today’s phone makers can squeeze into a camera phone.

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