Ron is sharing a new portfolio of his autumn photography from Colorado and Zion National Park today. Like most of our recent work, he is sharing the photos in a PDF portfolio ebook (you can download it here, no email address or sign-up required). Each time we share one of these new ebooks, we receive a lot of questions that fall into two categories: why do you share your work this way and how can I create a similar PDF portfolio of my own work? We will answer both questions in this article.
A screenshot showing our current offering of ebook portfoliios
Our Reasons for Sharing New Photos in Portfolio Ebooks
Our primary reason for sharing our photos in a PDF ebook format is controlling the presentation to a greater degree than we can do on our website or social media. Some nature photographers work in a style in which a single photo can stand on its own. While some of our photos can stand alone like this, Ron and I generally agree that our respective work is stronger when it is presented as a curated collection.
One message I hope to share through my work is that nature is full of all sorts of wonders, big and small, and they are all worthy of our attention. In an ebook portfolio, I can share all those little wonders in a way that amplifies this message through a curated collection, with the photos together building to a message that single photos cannot do on their own. While this is possible to a degree with a gallery of photos on our website, it absolutely is not possible on social media. (If you would like to learn more about my approach to curating collections of photos, you can view this YouTube video.)
With a website gallery, there will always be visual clutter competing for attention and without custom code, most lightbox viewing options include overlays and backgrounds that are not as visually appealing as a clean page in a PDF. Photos often look awful on social media. The list of reasons is long: tiny viewing sizes, strict aspect ratios, jumbled collage formats with few custom display options, low-quality file upload defaults, and awkward cropping when sharing links. While we both still share our photos on our website and on social media, neither is a fully satisfying way to present the results of a lot of hard work and photographic effort.
With a PDF, you are able to fully control the layout of each page and can suggest how the document should be viewed. We design our PDF portfolios to be viewed with a single page layout. This means that most of the photos are viewed on a full page with a simple white border and a small page number. We can also mix in pairs or grids if that presentation is a better fit for the photos or meets some other goal related to pacing or curation. PDF portfolios also help create a point-in-time archive of your work. Whereas a website is often curated over time, a collection of PDFs offers a way see how your work evolves over time. I’m still trying to decide on the right number of photos for such a publication but the overall format feels like the best fit for presenting my work at this point in time.
In sharing our photos in the PDF ebook format, we are asking more of our audience than some are going to be willing to give. To see a full portfolio, the viewer will need to go to our website, download the PDF, and then page through a large collection of photographs. We think the type of person who likes our respective work is going to be more inclined to do this than the average social media user but we know that some people are just not going to take those extra steps. We are fine with this reality because the ebook is just as much for us as it is for the viewer.
Overall, the response has been quite positive, in large part because we offer these ebooks for free and the download process is easy. We have a very high open rate from our newsletter list for these publications, so they are a good match for people who are invested in our work at that level. We also receive many nice messages of appreciation and a fair number of donations every time we share a new ebook. Sharing on social media isn’t as fruitful, likely because asking for a multi-step time commitment is not a great match for the mindless scrolling culture of Instagram or Facebook.
A screenshot of the page layouts from my Northwest Autumn ebook portfolio from Mount Rainier National Park
CREATING YOUR OWN PDF EBOOK PORTFOLIO
Below, I share some of the steps that go into creating a PDF ebook portfolio, with a focus on the questions we receive most often. First and most important: we use Affinity Publisher software to create our ebooks and highly recommend it. This software is an alternative to Adobe InDesign. It has fewer features compared to InDesign but works very well for digital publications and is affordable. If you can use photo processing software, you will be able to use Affinity Publisher to create a PDF ebook. You can also use Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Google Slides, or other software that can save to PDF but you will have far fewer customization, design, and export options.
(A brief digression: We are often asked why we do not use online ebook creation and viewer services (you can find an example of this kind of service here). It is easier and probably faster to use an ebook creation service but we personally find these unappealing, especially since the whole point of making these ebooks is controlling the process. These services often host your PDF, which means your audience is not going to your website to view your PDF. These services also come with display limitations. Most try to imitate the experience of viewing a physical book with page turn sounds and animations. This means that they present ebook publications in two-page spreads which we think defeats the major benefit of sharing your work as a PDF portfolio: the ability to share your photos in a full page format in an uncluttered way. With a two-page spread, you see two squatty pages spread across a screen with all the navigation tools adding visual clutter.)
A screenshot of a page from Ron’s ebook portfolio from autumn in Colorado and Zion National Park. The pink text shows the tasks you need to learn to create a PDF portfolio in Affinity Publisher.
USING AFFINITY PUBLISHER
We set up our Affinity Publisher file with these basics:
Dimensions: 2160px by 1440px in the horizontal format. If you mostly photograph in a vertical format or a 4:5 aspect ratio, you will want to adjust these dimensions to better fit your photos.
Color space: sRGB for increased compatibility across devices.
Full-page photos are sized to 1440px on the vertical edge. For smaller photos, we size to 144 dpi because this is what we use for the export (a reasonable compromise between file size and quality).
To create the file using Affinity Publisher, you need to learn how to do these tasks:
Create the document, starting with the basics from above.
Place images into your document and arrange them on each page.
Add text frames for both headers and body text, and learn how to get text to flow from one page to the next. If you have a lot of text, you will also want to set up character and paragraph styles to help ensure consistency across your document. For a document like this, one or two fonts is probably best. A simple design lets the photos get most of the attention.
Adding page numbers and document navigation (adding anchors and PDF bookmarks).
Exporting the file to PDF and deciding where to host it for download (we use Dropbox).
Quality control, like making sure all the photos are placed in the exact same spot on each page, that the text formatting is consistent throughout, and that details like spacing and margins are consistent. You will want to page through your document and make sure the viewing experience works from page to page. For example, inconsistent margins or slightly different photo sizes will result in visual jumps. It makes for a more pleasant viewing experience if you are consistent across the document.
The Affinity software company offers tutorial videos on how to do all of these things, and these resources are all you should need to create your first PDF. Creating this type of PDF for web-only sharing is pretty simple and I’d estimate that most people who are comfortable with computer work could go from downloading the software to having a draft ebook in a few hours (assuming you have already completed all your photo work and writing for the project).
If you decide to create your own PDF ebook portfolio, we would love to see it. You can share a link in the comments below or contact us here. We hope you find this method of presenting your photos as fulfilling as it has been for us.
Sarah Marino is a full-time photographer, nature enthusiast, and writer based in southwestern Colorado. In addition to photographing grand landscapes, Sarah is best known for her photographs of smaller subjects including intimate landscapes, abstract renditions of natural subjects, and creative portraits of plants and trees. Sarah is the author or co-author of a diverse range of educational resources for nature photographers on subjects including composition and visual design, photographing nature’s small scenes, black and white photography, Death Valley National Park, and Yellowstone National Park. Sarah, a co-founder of the Nature First Alliance for Responsible Nature Photography, also seeks to promote the responsible stewardship of natural and wild places through her photography and teaching.