carbonmade

After Pinterest and Scoop.It, another fun toy I have been playing with is carbonmade. Does it make it less of an online toy if it actually serves a professional purpose?

Carbonmade is an online portfolio service for photography, illustrations, video and other imagery. For free, one can make a portfolio with up to 5 projects and 35 images (but no video). For $12 a month, though, you can have up to 50 projects, 500 images and 10 videos.

For now and the foreseeable future, I have the free version. See my carbonmade photo portfolio here! But even with its limitations, it absolutely did the trick.

I had to create an online portfolio for work. I recently made a big career change from being a primarily freelance and contract copywriter to being a full-time lead copywriter at a marketing agency in the Twin Cities metro. During a team-building exercise, one of my co-workers proposed that I, being an amateur photographer with some published photos, create custom images for some of our clients. The stock service we use doesn’t always cut it.

Of course I loved the idea and went about creating an online portfolio to prove that I could do it. And 5 projects with 35 photos were more than enough to make my point. It was easy to customize my portfolio's appearance to make the images look their best. I'm a little disappointed with how the resolution looks, but that's probably because I'm using the free version.

Now it is up to me to determine how to best start this project and create an action plan for how to implement it. So yeah, the easy part is done, now comes the hard part. But I can see the value for having original imagery as part of an online content marketing plan. Everyone has the same stock photos, it’s the online marketing campaigns that create their own imagery that tend to stand out because it more closely aligns with their brand values and standards.

I'm going to help with that to the best of my ability! And probably expand my ability while I'm at it!

For the moment, my portfolio will remain as is. If I have to create another portfolio in the future for a different purpose, at least I will have a start. This served its purpose for now and isn’t needed at the moment, but one may never know when opportunities will arrive!