I just made this page for inclusion in a DVC Career Education Canvas Class Activity Page for students – any student suggestions to make it better?
Activity Page: Learn about Portfolios for Art and Craft Occupations
Most artistic and craft based occupations require you build a portfolio of your work. You need this so employers and clients will be able to see the quality of your design and/or construction work before they hire you. A portfolio is there to show the employer/client your aesthetic abilities, your range of styles, and demonstrate your ability to present and organize your work product. In broad general terms this applies for all artistic professions, regardless of type. You can learn about the specifics of your particular art(s) in a later project, but for now, view the following videos and web pages on a small sample of the wide assortment of jobs that require portfolios, and then reflect on what parts of this might apply to making a portfolio of your work.
Seeing what portfolios look like for these professions, describe what you think you can or should put into a portfolio to demonstrate your abilities in your area of study.
This page I just made for use in Career Education Canvas Classat DVC. I’d love it if my students at DVC would try it out and give feedback on how to make it better!
Activity Page: Learn about Portfolio Types
Most artistic and craft based occupations require you build a portfolio of your work. A portfolio is there to show the employer/client your aesthetic abilities, your range of styles, and demonstrate your ability to present and organize your work product. In broad general terms this applies for all artistic professions, regardless of type.
There are multiple formats portfolios can take. Many folks choose to do more than one type of these so they can show their work to the largest audience. However, to begin with, it is best to choose one, and work up from there. Read through these descriptions of the main types, and then consider which portfolio type you wish to work on first.
Traditional portfolios that you can carry around with you. (Port=to move about, Folio=pages, or a book of pages. Portfolio=a book of pages you can carry about). Most commonly, something like this for bringing to an interview:
Slideshow Portfolios are very old school as well, (and used to be the very expensive old way to mail out duplicate copies of the above format, on actual film slides) but they have been significantly modernized by PowerPoint, and are now one of the cheapest and easiest formats to create and share . They also can form a basis for making the next two types of portfolio. PowerPoint is included in the Microsoft Office software that you as a DVC student can download freely to your own computer. Here is an example of one:
PDF Portfolios sometimes are simply scans of a Traditional Portfolio like the first one above, or may include more extensive text for explanation, as these are usually sent to a remote interview where it will be judged before one is chosen for an interview. These can usually be made in PowerPoint as a PPt slideshow (or Google Slides in Google) first, or instead made in Word like a paper before saving as a PDF. These also can be inserted into online book/magazine sharing sites like Issuu to be viewed by the public without having to build a a full web portfolio.
Video Portfolios are where you can show your work like a TV commercial or virtual interview by showing your work in the order you want with voice over description or music. You can again begin with a basic a PowerPoint/Google Slides show, then narrate or add music, only this time instead of saving as a PDF, save it as a mp4 file. If having your portfolio have live action or animation is especially appropriate for your art, this format is best one to allow you to do so. For example, musicians & other performers usually do this. So do designers and makers who have work that moves, like kinetic sculpture, robotics, character design, animation/motion graphics. Animators especially can go nuts and do this sort of thing:
Web Based Portfolios cover a large swath of types, from basic web pages, blogs, galleries and a plethora of other formats ). If you have a professor at DVC who tells you you need to have a portfolio, you can probably check out theirs online. Here are just a few:
A web based portfolio can also showcase some of the other types (PDF, Video) listed above within it, and allows for multiple portfolios and areas of your work to be gathered together and be routinely added to.
Consider your options and then reflect on which format do you think you will start with and why?
Putting Personality in Your Portfolio & Resume the respectable sounding title TD&T put on my how-to on the topic: Stroking Your Own Ego to Get Jobs is my broad general advice on this topic. Both versions of this cheery screed have their strong points, as well as different bits of my old portfolios. However, there are a lot of specifics I can send your way as well:
It costs me a low amount of money to operate annually, but hundreds of hours total to make, update and repair, done in little fits and starts of just a few hours or days every six months or so. You need to start your portfolio soon, and work on it whenever you create work on a new show or project (or have time to mess with it) to insert it in as an update.
If you poke around this site you will find it also links to some PDF portfolios I post at Issuu. Some employers want PDFs, so having them already posted online is useful.
These last three (Issuu, Shutterfly and YouTube) cost me nothing at all to operate, though they also take time. So you have many available formats for displaying your portfolio materials online, may of them free to use. Having good material on multiple platforms that can interconnect gives you more exposure and more options of ways to show off your work.
If you are/were a student at DVC and are looking for images from shows you have worked on, or past classes with me that you have done since 2009 I also encourage you to both go to DVC Drama Photo Archive and Portfolio/Resume Advice a multi year project where I have been uploading photos of past shows at DVC (for use in student portfolios) and advice on how to make different types of them.
Free Techie/Designer Resume Template(MS Word.doc). This is a great sample resume template for beginning designers and other Theatre Tech emphasis people, created by Kade Mendelowitz , the TD/LD of UAF who is a former colleague of mine. You can download the file and open it in your word processing program to use it.
Here are some very clear simple basic portfolio how-tos to start you off if you really have no idea what a portfolio is or what to do:
The single thing that helps most with your portfolio is taking lots of pictures and then sorting and organizing them by topic so you can find the ones you need. After that it is just labeling. So if you have access to any stuff you have made, photograph it NOW, and start organizing. Two tutorials I’ve done on how to do this are here:
Free portfolio hosting sites have a variety of styles of presentation that you may prefer, so poking around these places may have you find a free option that suits your aesthetic needs:
Note, a lot of this information is outdated or overkill with the ease and quality improvements in digital cameras, but the basics are not, diffused lighting is the holy grail that gets you good detail even now…
The unofficial name for this lecture should be “Photographing Costume Porn” What is costume porn, and why would I want anything to do with that kinky Japanese stuff? You are confused. What you are thinking of right now is Cosplay porn, where comely young girls dress up in costumes from Manga comics and Anime films and are photographed fondling each other. Costume porn, on the other hand is perfectly respectable. The Victoria and Albert Museum actually does it best. Costume porn consists of close-up luscious photos of costumes that make costumers get far more excited than any sane person should get by a museum publication showing old clothes. If you can open the pages of Fashion by the Kyoto Costume Institute, or Historical Fashion in Detail: The 17th and 18th Centuries from the V&A and not begin to breathe heavily, you are NOT a costumer.
If you’ve ever tried taking photos of your own costumes wanting them to look like that and instead had them come out like bad snapshots, you’ve probably wondered how those almost edible museum photos were taken. Books that tell you about fashion photography don’t tell you much about how to do this sort of shot, and what little they do tell you implies you need to buy lots of fancy equipment. You don’t. You do need a bunch of equipment, in fact you need to build yourself a temporary photo studio to take this kind of detail rich shot, but it can be relatively cheap, and you can make or assemble much of it yourself. But before I tell you about that, here are some definitions of photo terminology just in case photography is Greek to you.
Some Basic Photo Terminology:
Camera Types:
Digital Cameras This is what I now use and recommend. They do not use film, so they pay for themselves quickly, despite being fairly pricey. Models now available range from junk that makes disposable snapshot cameras look good, to fancy professional models that can do anything an SLR can do and more. Quality of images is counted in Megapixels. Do not bother getting anything below 5MP. Most digital cameras are easier to operate than a normal SLR, but less easy than a fixed focus snapshot camera.
SLR (Single Lens Reflex) Pro-type film camera, good adaptability, difficult to learn, but can produce highest quality results.
Snapshot Camera Simple film camera, easy to use, cheap, but very limited in what it can do.
Film Speed:
Fast film (400 ASA and higher) is good for low light and/or fast movement. 400 ASA is the slowest film you would dare use to film a brightly lit show indoors.
Slow Film (360 ASA and lower) is good when using a tripod to photograph still objects for a long exposure, or for color- rich photos taken in bright outdoor light.
Film Type:
Daylight film(what you can buy anywhere), color is correct for outdoors and with flash, but will tint orange under incandescent and stage lights. Tints a little green-gray under fluorescent light.
Tungsten film (For sale in specialty camera stores and online), color is correct for incandescent/stage lights, but tints blue outdoors in daylight. Also tints a little bit green-gray under fluorescent light.
The key to detail rich costume “porn” shots is quite simple. They are low-contrast shots in perfect focus, usually pulled into tight details of the costume. The means to create them involves careful setup and control of a few factors: lighting, film speed, exposure time, color temperature and mannequin set up. To gain control of all of these save film speed, you need to put together a temporary photo studio that does the following:
Provides as much light as possible, as diffused as possible.
Includes a tripod for keeping the camera and costume still for a nice long exposure with slow film and NO camera mounted flash
Has a method of displaying the costume to it’s best advantage on a dress form, mannequin or live model.
Controls the color temperature by either matching the film type to the light source, or by modifying the light source either with camera filters, light filters, or digital enhancing.
Removes distractions from the background.
Some of the materials you need to do this you may already have on hand, or can borrow to make your own temporary photo studio:
Decent film camera (35mm SLR) or digital camera (4MP or higher). Digital cameras tend to self-correct color temperature, or produce images which are easy to correct in a photo processing program like Adobe Photoshop.
Get a cheap tripod especially for studio shots. Then you can use slow film 200asa and lower for these shots to get the best color and detail. You can also take good photos of yourself in costume using a camera’s timer.
If you have a film camera and are filming indoors you will also need either a blue filter and daylight film, or no filter and tungsten film. Choose film with a low ASA speed, like 200 or lower, Kodak’s tungsten film KODAK PROFESSIONAL PORTRA 100T is especially good for this type of work because it is low-contrast.
Two ladies wraps from 1910-1920 photographed with Portra 100T in the author’s private collection.Detail of two ladies wraps from 1910-1920 photographed with Portra 100T in the author’s private collection.
As much light as possible, any way you can manage it.
Clip lights, or various lamps with the shades taken off. Clip lamps are a great thing, you can buy lots of them because they are cheap, but even if you use “Reveal” bluish looking bulbs, the light coming off them is orangey-yellow (tungsten), this means you will need to color correct some way, either with a blue filter on the camera, blue gels on the lights, tungsten (not daylight) film, or a lot of fiddling in Photoshop later.
A bright sunny window with a white sheet across it as a diffuser.
If you are filming outdoors just get some friends to hold up a white bedsheet between the costume and the sun to act as a diffuser. Diffused light is the single most important factor in taking good costume porn.
Squares of buckram, paper or Pellon, to diffuse the lights. Clothespins to hold them onto clip lights like this.
Translucent filters cut out of buckram, interfacing or paper may be attached to clip lights with clothespins to diffuse the light.
Dress forms, head/hat stands, or mannequins as available for displaying the costume items. If using live models, do not forget makeup.
Chairs, boxes & stools to hold small items up to a level where they can be photographed, and/or to serve as lamp holders.
Hat racks, music stands, or any upright poles for clip lamps to grab on.
Bed sheets, bulk fabric yardage in various colors, or roll paper for background. You can make a great neutral backdrop for photos by sewing together two bed sheets. Put one end beneath the mannequin, and hoist the other over the top bar of a rolling rack, or a curtain rod.
Clothesline, clothing rack or pole to hold up the background
Extension cords with power strip surge suppressors for safety and easy turn-off of multiple lights between shots.
Nylon stockings, netting, fiberfill, clothes hanger wire to make bendable “arms” for a costume on an armless dress form.
Crumpled newspapers to fill out skirts or sleeve puffs to correct fullness.
Duct tape, for keeping lights in place, heads on mannequins, and the background taut and smooth.
Straight pins, and fishing line for invisibly getting figures to pose as desired.
Photo processing program for fixing color problems and minor mistakes using your computer (Adobe Photoshop Elements is a good choice).
Set up your “Studio” in a configuration like one of these:
A very basic cheap set up for photographing indoors. Clip lamps shoot light from the sides, while rolled paper hung over a garment rack forms a background.Another cheap set up done with bed sheets tucked up into ceiling tiles, and clip lamps with paper diffusion filters.Sample of an inexpensive indoor set up made with bed sheets, clip lamps with paper diffusers, and assorted lamps put behind the side sheets to diffuse their light.Two helpers hold up sheets to diffuse direct sunlight for this outdoor shot. A foggy day also works well at diffusion of sunlight.Diffusing sunlight with an inexpensive lawn shade, and some extra sheets put on the side the sun is shining, and/or as a background.
More Hints for taking Portfolio Pictures
The Simon/Maginnis Family method: Take LOTS of photos and throw out the bad ones. If for some reason you can’t take photos of an event, consider doing the wedding reception method: hand out lots of disposable cameras to everyone, then gather them up, process the pictures, and see what you get.
“Not even Kodak can take pictures yesterday”. Don’t put it off. Start taking photos while you are building the costume and don’t stop till you have several good shots of every aspect of the costume. A digital camera often encourages this because of its photos’ cheapness.
Foggy Funk? Has a dim, gray, foggy day got you in a funk? Don’t let it! The grayer and more miserable a day, the better for taking costume photos outdoors. You don’t need ANY of the diffusers, extra lights, tents, etc. if you have a gray enough day. It’s like having a huge free photo studio that requires no setup to get perfect lighting!
Once you’ve spent all the time setting up your studio and mannequin, take lots of photos from many angles, especially pulling in very close for maximum detail. This is the essence of the costume “porn” shot, the images that excite your fellow costumers with rich details and textures.
Mannequins look great if you spend just a few minutes adjusting and pinning the costume so it looks like a big puppet of the character. You can fatten out arms just by stuffing net into the cut off legs of a pair of pantyhose. Consider posing multiple characters together in relationships.
Costumes for the Presidente Tourvel and Mme de Rosamond in Les Liaisons Dangereuses UAF 2002
You can make a great neutral backdrop for photos by sewing together two bed sheets. Put one end beneath the mannequin, and hoist the other over the top bar of a rolling rack, or a curtain rod.
Photograph costumes on the performer while he or she is in character. If you can’t get the original performer, make sure your live model or mannequin stands in a characteristic attitude, not just like a lump.
Costume for Gwendolyn Fairfax in The Importance of Being Earnest, Theatre UAF, 2000. Posing a mannequin with accessories, foam head, and stuffed nylon “arms”, to put the costume in “character”.
For photographing live performances use “fast” film, 400asa or HIGHER if you can’t use a flash. 99% of the time flash is a bad idea anyway even if it is allowed.
WHEN TO SHOOT THE ACTORS: Good times to snap during a live show are at still moments, and at the ends of actions like the momentary “freeze” at the end of a musical number, or the second’s pause of reaction in a fight. Even in a dancer’s leap, the point at which the body is fully extended in the leap, is held a moment longer than the motions leading to it, and is besides, more visually exciting to look at.
Try to get a formal “photo call” for posed shots of at least 2 hours in length put into the rehearsal/performance schedule for the show as early as possible so everyone expects it (the least annoying time is often just after the 1st Sunday matinee). Work out (with the other members of the production team) a list of which scenes you want to photograph, who is in them, and in what order, and make sure everyone has a copy so the process moves fast. Since these are posed shots you can use a tripod and longer exposures than when photographing a live show.
“The Grand Tarot”, 1997, UAF Student Drama Association, costumes designed by Tara Maginnis.
This photo call shot shows how being allowed to freeze actors for a long exposure allows one to get an impression of costumes under stage lighting conditions that would be too dim for taking show shots of moving actors without flash. The Grand Tarot, UAF Student Drama Association Special Presentation, 1996.
Even a whiny uncooperative cast will willingly line up to pose for you backstage in character in costume if you truthfully tell them that you are taking their photos as their opening night gifts, and then order double prints so you can give them photos of themselves, and have a set to keep. People will often willingly ham it up in character at great length, getting you really good character costume shots. This way you can also control the lighting and give yourself a blank background, without distractions.
If you do renderings, make sure that you also get a photo of the costume that demonstrates how closely it resembles your original drawing. You can ask performers to pose in a manner similar to your drawing, or choose a “live” onstage shot where the performer is in a similar pose.
If your costume involves a spectacularly transforming makeup, make sure to get a face photo of the performer both with the makeup and without, so people can see the “before and after” difference.
If you have done something clever to make the costume that isn’t obvious while it is worn, do a detail photo of the inside where you have hidden your secret.
Learn to use Adobe Photoshop (Adobe Photoshop Elements is fine too) for fixing color problems, removing extraneous background details, and combining photos into portfolio layouts.
Portfolio page layouts (whether done in Photoshop or by normal scrap booking methods) are especially effective if they include multiple images of a costume. An ideal layout might include a rendering, a build and/or detail shot, a show shot, and a posed close-up. Swatches help too.
Once you get good photos make a point of keeping them together and semi-organized so you can find them when needed. If you have them in digital form, back them up and store the backups with a willing relative or friend. Home made CDs and DVDs often have little more than a 1-2 year shelf life. Make sure images are backed up on a hard drive as well as disks, and, when you can have them, prints and negatives.
Costumes from “The Mikado”, 1999, Theatre UAF, designed by Tara Maginnis
