You have an excellent eye and your photos look really professional! Selling your services is exceptionally hard at the beginning. Don’t be discouraged by a lack of responses to your pitch, follow up every so often and most importantly keep finding new ways to improve your portfolio. As sad as it is many companies are more interested in follower counts and likes than they are technical ability, so my suggestion would be to post as much high quality content as you can (1-2x daily) and start creating reels/tiktoks to build your follower count and portfolio. While photos are certainly still used and it’s perfectly fine to stay a still photo purist, the algorithms definitely favor video content.
At the beginning of your career you should do as many shoots as you can, paid or not, and explore your creativity so you learn as much as possible. In order to reliably make real money as a photographer ($100k+ annually) you will need one of the following: Significant social follower count (5k+) + consistent content posting in your specialty (automotive photography,) a network of paying professional clients with consistent work for you every month, a very successful print/stock image operation, art galleries representing your work, get hired full time by a dealership chain or car magazine or get a solid stream of one off clients who might pay less than the commercial/regular ones but come in enough quantity to fill your schedule and pay the bills. I have been in most of these situations, they all have their pros and cons.
As others have mentioned, you should be more ruthless in your culling of your photos and cropping/framing. Presenting 10 exceptional photos each of which show a clear subject and tell a story is infinitely more compelling than 50 images of varying quality on a webpage. Other than that you need to focus on the basics: Build a brand, set your pricing, develop a marketing strategy and plan for gear upgrades before you impulse buy.
You have an excellent eye and your photos look really professional! Selling your services is exceptionally hard at the beginning. Don’t be discouraged by a lack of responses to your pitch, follow up every so often and most importantly keep finding new ways to improve your portfolio. As sad as it is many companies are more interested in follower counts and likes than they are technical ability, so my suggestion would be to post as much high quality content as you can (1-2x daily) and start creating reels/tiktoks to build your follower count and portfolio. While photos are certainly still used and it’s perfectly fine to stay a still photo purist, the algorithms definitely favor video content.
At the beginning of your career you should do as many shoots as you can, paid or not, and explore your creativity so you learn as much as possible. In order to reliably make real money as a photographer ($100k+ annually) you will need one of the following: Significant social follower count (5k+) + consistent content posting in your specialty (automotive photography,) a network of paying professional clients with consistent work for you every month, a very successful print/stock image operation, art galleries representing your work, get hired full time by a dealership chain or car magazine or get a solid stream of one off clients who might pay less than the commercial/regular ones but come in enough quantity to fill your schedule and pay the bills. I have been in most of these situations, they all have their pros and cons.
As others have mentioned, you should be more ruthless in your culling of your photos and cropping/framing. Presenting 10 exceptional photos each of which show a clear subject and tell a story is infinitely more compelling than 50 images of varying quality on a webpage. Other than that you need to focus on the basics: Build a brand, set your pricing, develop a marketing strategy and plan for gear upgrades before you impulse buy.