One of the harder things I've had to learn while building Locky B Photography is that liking a photograph isn't always enough reason to put it in my portfolio.
That sounds simple now, but for a long time my approach was fairly straightforward. If I took a photograph I liked, edited it and felt proud of the result, naturally I wanted to show it.
The problem is that a portfolio isn't really a collection of every good photograph you've taken.
It is a collection of photographs that need to work together.
As I've spent more time building and refining my own galleries, I've started looking at individual images differently. Instead of only asking whether I like a photograph, I've begun asking whether it adds something to the collection around it.
Sometimes the answer is yes.
Sometimes the photograph is perfectly good, but the answer is still no.
And learning to recognise the difference has probably made my portfolio stronger than simply adding more photographs ever could.
Looking at the Collection, Not Just the Photograph
One of the biggest shifts for me has been learning to stop judging every image in isolation.
A photograph might have strong light, good composition and enough detail to work perfectly well on its own, but that doesn't automatically mean it adds something useful to the gallery around it.
Sometimes I already have another image from the same place that tells the story better. Sometimes two photographs are so similar that keeping both actually weakens the impact of the stronger one. Other times an image might be perfectly good, but it changes the rhythm of a gallery in a way that doesn't quite feel right.
That has made curation much less about asking, "Is this photo good?" and more about asking, "What does this photo contribute?"
Does it show something new?
Does it add a different perspective, mood or detail?
Does it strengthen the story of the gallery?
Or am I keeping it simply because I remember how much I liked it when I first edited it?
Those questions have made me much more selective, but they've also helped me appreciate the photographs that do stay in the portfolio even more.
Some Photographs Still Matter Without Being in the Portfolio
One thing I've had to remind myself of is that removing a photograph from my portfolio doesn't make it meaningless.
Some images matter because of the memory attached to them. Some are photographs I enjoyed making even if they don't fit naturally into one of my galleries. Others might work well on social media, tell part of a travel story or simply represent a moment I wanted to keep.
Not every photograph needs to become part of the permanent portfolio.
That distinction has actually made the whole process feel less restrictive. Instead of asking every image to do the same job, I can let different photographs exist for different reasons.
A portfolio image needs to strengthen the body of work around it.
A personal photograph might only need to remind me why I took it.
Both can still have value.
Learning to Remove Good Work
Probably the hardest part of curating a portfolio is removing photographs that I still like.
It is easy to delete an image that clearly doesn't work. The more difficult decisions are the photographs that are technically solid, have something I enjoy about them, and might even be photographs I was proud of when I first added them.
Those are the ones that tend to hang around.
I've found that stepping back and looking at an entire gallery at once makes those decisions much easier. Sometimes one image suddenly feels noticeably weaker than everything around it. Other times the problem isn't that the photograph is weak at all, but that another image is already doing the same job more effectively.
Removing it can actually make the stronger image feel stronger.
That was something I didn't fully appreciate until I started properly refining my galleries. I used to think that adding more good photographs would automatically make the portfolio better, but sometimes the opposite is true. A smaller collection with fewer repeated ideas can feel much more deliberate.
There have already been photographs I've removed from my website that I still genuinely like.
I don't suddenly think they're bad.
They just weren't helping the collection as much as I wanted them to.
A Portfolio Is Never Really Finished
The more I work on my portfolio, the more I realise that it probably isn't something that will ever feel completely finished.
My photography is still changing. The way I edit is changing. The things I notice when I'm out with a camera are changing too.
That means the photographs I choose to represent my work should be allowed to change with me.
An image that feels important now might eventually be replaced by something stronger. A photograph I once overlooked might suddenly make more sense when I return to it later. Entire galleries might grow, shrink or shift direction as I become more certain about the kind of work I want to make.
I actually like that.
It takes some of the pressure away from trying to build the perfect portfolio all at once. Instead, I can treat it as something that evolves alongside the photography itself.
For me, the goal isn't to have the biggest collection of photographs possible.
It's to have a collection where every image feels like it belongs.
And sometimes making that collection stronger means being willing to remove a photograph I still like.
Good photographs can still be left out.