Building a portfolio from perishable work

A florist's portfolio is the entire sales apparatus. Clients do not read about your approach; they look at what you have made and decide whether it resembles what they want.

And none of it survives. A wedding you spent three days on exists as flowers for six hours, and after that it exists only as photographs.

Decide in advance what you need from each job

Turning up to an event and photographing whatever catches your eye produces a folder of similar wide shots.

Before an event, list what you actually need:

• The ceremony arrangement, wide, from the angle guests see it.
• One detail of the focal work.
• The table setting, both wide and from seated eye level.
• Any installation, from far enough back that its scale reads.
• The bouquet, alone, against something plain.

Five specific images beats fifty vague ones, and it takes ten minutes at the right moment.

Photograph the bouquet before it leaves you

The bridal bouquet is your most valuable single image and the one you are least likely to get later. Once it goes to the bride you will not see it again in good condition.

Photograph it at your workroom setup before delivery: plain background, one light, two angles and one detail. Two minutes, and it is a portfolio piece regardless of what the event photographer produces.

You will not get the professional photographs, or not soon

Event photographers deliver in weeks or months, they photograph people rather than flowers, and their images are usually licensed to the couple rather than to you.

Ask, always — many will share, and credit costs you nothing — but never plan around it. The photographs you take yourself are the ones you can rely on.

Photograph the setup, not the event

Arriving early and photographing the room before guests is when everything is pristine and nothing is in the way.

This is also the only time you can photograph an installation without people in front of it, and the only time the table settings are complete and untouched.

Twenty minutes before doors is worth more than two hours during.

Organise by what the client asked for

A portfolio sorted by date is useless in a sales conversation. A portfolio sorted by brief is a tool.

Tag by palette, by season, by style, by venue type, by budget bracket. When a client says they want something soft and green for an autumn garden wedding, you want to produce four relevant examples in thirty seconds.

Use the everyday work too

Weddings dominate florists' portfolios and misrepresent most of their businesses. Weekly office arrangements, funeral tributes, hand-tied bouquets and shop stock are all work you can be booked for, and all of it goes unphotographed.

One arrangement a day, photographed at your permanent setup, is three hundred images a year across everything you actually do.

Where staging fits into a portfolio

Consistency is what makes a portfolio read as one florist rather than as a scrapbook. Work photographed in a cold workroom, at an event, in a shop and in a van will never match on its own.

Running your own captures through the same scene puts them on a common footing — same surface, same light, same treatment — so the portfolio reads as a body of work. Each arrangement stays exactly as you built it; what changes is that they finally look like they belong together.