14 Photographer Portfolio Examples For Inspiration

When they need a website, photographers use Format. Format is an easy, robust, professionally designed portfolio website platform featuring real humans to support your site build. Too often seeing great work suffer from bad design, Format’s founding mission is to support artists, photographers and designers to create elegant, beautifully designed websites to showcase their work. With hundreds of thousands of creatives using the platform, we gathered some of the most aspirational examples of what’s possible on Format.

Platform Features and Workflow

Format allows you to run your photography business like a pro with tools designed for creative professionals:

• Workflow: Manage your photography business and client galleries.
• Prints Marketplace: Expand your brand and sell more.
• Photo Storage: Cloud photo storage for your creative work.
• Website Building Service: Free website design for Pro Plus members.

Aspirational Portfolio Examples

1. Franklin Yeep

A black & white film photographer based in NYC, Yeep shoots their portrait subjects using only analog tools, believing that the slow process allows the sitter to “breathe”. In those breaths, Yeep is able to capture their subjects in an honest, unguarded way. From start to finish, film and prints are processed by hand, allowing Yeep full control over the creative process. Yeep’s uniquely intimate and soulful work has been featured in publications like Vogue, Iconic and Voila!

2. Brittany Bravo

Born and raised in Los Angeles, CA, Brittany Bravo is a Chicana director and photographer. Her love for her community is reflected in her photographic work, where she captures her sitters through a powerful and tender lens. Bright hues in backdrops compliment the colorful clothing and styling of her subjects, in tableaus that revel in joy and connection between subjects and the natural world. Bravo is a world-builder inspired by and imaginatively expanding on the traditions of Chicano culture.

3. Rob Schanz

Rob Schanz is a commercial and editorial photographer. While based in San Francisco, it’s Schanz’s travels that inspire them in approach and subject, wanting to leave the viewer feeling as if they are with him in his experience of the moment, adventure, or observation of an object. The sensation of movement is indelible from his travel images, making these images a strong call to action for brands with whom he collaborates.

4. Alexandra Arnold

Alexandra Arnold is a celebrity, fashion, and portrait photographer. Now residing in NYC, Alexandra’s focus is capturing iconic performers with a style and sensibility that reveals something new and unexpected. Contrast and vivid filmic tones lend a nostalgia and palpable warmth reminiscent of Kodak, pulling her images out of time and space, rendering them as dreamlike vignettes of her subjects.

5. Kyle Dorosz

Born and raised in the state of Maryland, photographer Kyle Dorosz is now based in New York City. A portraitist driven to capture the individual and their complexities in an image, this palpable sense of authenticity is present even in highly commercial works. That he is so successful in this pursuit of idiosyncratic representation is a credit to his own ability to connect with others.

6. Hazel May Eckert

Originally from Toronto, Hazel May Eckert is now based in St. John’s. The photographic image is abstracted in Eckert’s recent work, eliminating focus and instead capturing color and form–an evolution from previous bodies of work that explored the beauty of shadows. Simple outlines of familiar objects and items are rendered universal in the absence of the objects themselves. Eckert is the creator of Nothing New, an independent publishing insignia producing small-scale artist editions.

7. Lindsey Wernli

Philadelphia-based editorial and still life photographer Lindsey Wernli makes exceptional use of color and texture to create lush and otherworldly compositions from everyday objects. Her vivid still life images nod to the baroque tradition, distinctly contemporized by details like stickers, plastic vessels and bubble wrap. Through her lens the banal becomes uncanny, and commercial assignments are elevated to art in surreal and playful arrangements.

Summary of Featured Creatives

• Franklin Yeep: NYC-based black & white film portraiture.
• Brittany Bravo: Chicana director and photographer based in Los Angeles.
• Rob Schanz: Commercial and editorial photographer based in San Francisco.
• Alexandra Arnold: Celebrity and fashion photographer residing in NYC.
• Kyle Dorosz: Portrait photographer driven by authenticity, based in NYC.
• Hazel May Eckert: Abstract color and form photographer based in St. John’s.
• Lindsey Wernli: Philadelphia-based editorial and still life specialist.