How to build a modelling portfolio that actually gets you booked

We look at a lot of portfolios. The ones that lead to a meeting have very little in common with the ones that look most impressive on a phone screen, and the difference is worth understanding before you spend money on a shoot.

Start with digitals, not a shoot

Digitals — sometimes called polaroids — are plain photographs of you, taken against a blank wall in daylight, with no makeup, no styling and no retouching. Hair tied back. Clothes that show your actual shape: fitted top, jeans or shorts, flat shoes.

You need six: face straight on, face in profile, full body front, full body side, full body back, and one smiling. That is the single most useful thing you can send us, and it costs nothing. Every agency asks for them, and we ask for them again before any client sees you, because they tell us what you look like today rather than what a retoucher could do.

Heavy editing works against you

A smoothed, reshaped, colour-graded portfolio does not make a booker think you look better. It makes them think they cannot tell what you look like, which is the same as not being able to book you. If a client books from an edited image and someone different arrives, that is our problem and your reputation.

Range matters more than polish

Ten photographs from one shoot in one outfit with one expression is one photograph. Four shoots that look genuinely different — a clean commercial smile, a strong editorial frame, something with movement, something in profile — tell a booker you can be cast for more than one job.

If you only have one shoot so far, say so. We would rather see four honest images than twenty that pad it out.

What to leave out

• Group shots. We cannot tell which one is you, and we will not guess.
• Photographs with heavy filters or visible phone beautification.
• Anything taken more than about two years ago, unless it is a real published campaign.
• Images where the styling is so strong that it is a photograph of a dress rather than of you.
• Screenshots of social media posts.

A few practical things

Keep the file sizes sensible — a folder of 40 MB files will not open on a phone in a casting. Name the folder with your name and the month. Put your height and your measurements in the message, not inside the images, because a booker searching for a height will search text.

What happens when you send it to us

Someone at the agency reads every application. If your photographs suit work we actually book, we will ask you in to meet us and to take digitals ourselves. If they do not, we will tell you that too — a clear no is more useful to you than silence, and there is no shortage of agencies that will leave you waiting instead.

Applications go through our Represent me page. You need to be 18 or over.