Photographer playbook

Ask AI

What a photographer’s clients look for before they get in touch, which pages carry it, and the worked site to start from; read building first.

What their clients are deciding

A client picks a photographer on four questions, roughly in this order:

Do I like the pictures? Style decides it, and style is shown, not described. The work is the first thing on the site and most of it.
Can I afford it? A price or a “from” price for each kind of shoot. A photographer who hides prices loses the clients who would have booked and keeps the ones who only ask.
Are they free, and what do I get? For weddings, the date. For everything else, how long the session is, how many edited pictures, and when they arrive.
Will I be comfortable with them? A face, a few sentences in their own voice, and how a shoot actually goes.

Pages

Home. A first screen with the trade and the city, the call to action, and the best wide picture. Then a gallery of 6 to 12 pictures, mixed in proportion to the work the owner wants booked (a wedding photographer who shows mostly portraits gets portrait enquiries). Then services with prices, then who they are, with a picture of them.
Services, once there are more than three packages or each needs more than two sentences: what is included, hours, number of pictures, delivery time, deposit.
Work, when the owner has whole shoots worth telling: one item per wedding or session in the portfolio table, with a cover, a line of summary and a few paragraphs (vzk/tables, “Portfolio”). Three good ones beat twelve thin ones.
Blog, only if the owner will write in it. Good posts answer what clients ask before booking: how a wedding day runs, where to shoot in their city, what to wear. A blog with one post from launch day hurts more than it helps.

The call to action is one of “check your date” (weddings) or “book a session” (everything else), wired to an enquiry form (a public enquiries table and a form that names it, see vzk/tables) or to the owner’s booking link.

The worked site

The sites topic carries a whole photographer’s site: photographer/index, photographer/services, photographer/work, photographer/work/[slug], photographer/blog and photographer/blog/[slug], in the mineral look, in English and Ukrainian, with a portfolio table and a posts table. Take its structure, its field layout and its translation pattern, never its sentences: Mira’s promises and prices are hers.

Two things not to copy. Its booking buttons are drawn as <button> with nowhere to go, so wire yours to the call to action above. And its picture frames show placeholder labels; yours should show the owner’s files once they are on the disk (vzk/pages, Files).

Ask the owner

On top of the brief in building:

Which kinds of shoot they want more of, and which they would rather stop.
For each: price, length, number of edited pictures, delivery time, deposit.
How far they travel, and what travel costs.
How booking works today: an email, a call, a date check, a booking link.
Their Instagram handle, and the 10 to 15 pictures they would put first.
Whether couples or clients in the pictures are happy to be on the site.

Copy

The pictures carry the feeling, so the words carry facts. Name the place and the kind of shoot in captions (“Elopement, Tempelhofer Feld”), not the mood. Avoid “capturing moments”, “timeless”, “memories that last forever”, “your special day” and “storyteller”: every photographer’s site says them.

The about section is where the owner’s voice matters most. Use their bio or captions and keep their phrasing. A detail only they could say (“I still cry behind the camera once per ceremony”) is worth more than a list of qualities.

Pictures and look

The hero is their single best wide picture. A portrait-only photographer uses a tall frame instead.
The gallery keeps the owner’s crop. Mix wide and tall, and don’t put two pictures from one session side by side.
No watermarks, and no pictures edited in a style they no longer shoot.
mineral is the default. A photographer with a warm, film look may suit claret; one with a loud editorial brand may suit press.