If you don’t know much about Macon, Georgia, photographer Matt Odom can tell you a few stories. A Macon native, Mercer University alumni, and current resident, Matt takes pride in his hometown and it shines through in his work. However, as much as he enjoys focusing on local residents, athletes and workers, Matt was looking to reach bigger clients outside of his area when he approached us. The interesting part about his portfolio was that the photographic style was consistent, but his subject matter wasn’t. We set out to solve this in a web edit.
Matt uses a Format template, and at the time of our initial conversation had a very busy menu and gallery navigation. He also had a landing page that gave the option to be led to either his commercial or his wedding site. We encouraged Matt to keep his wedding portfolio completely separate from his commercial one, as they are essentially two different businesses. Within an hour of suggesting a different layout, he had it changed, which showed how serious he was about taking initiative on this refresh. While we dove into his images, Matt also took it upon himself to begin simplifying his logo.
We, along with clients, are big fans of seeing personal work on a photographer’s website. Matt had a few projects in addition to his main portfolios at the time. Although we were happy to see that, they felt incomplete on their own, but simultaneously felt like the missing puzzle pieces in his main portfolios, which we narrowed down to portraits and sports. We decided to pull the strongest images from his personal projects to fill in the gaps with a plan to later revive them when he had more work built up.
We organized his portraits starting with musicians, to environmental or “real” people, and ending with corporate. In the future, it may be worth it for him to divide these into individual galleries, but for now, it laid out the foundation for the material that’s yet to be shot.
Sports are a second passion of Matt’s. He started his career as a sports reporter and continues to coach soccer today (we had fun talking about the World Cup in between discussing photos.) The trickiest part of organizing his sports images was balancing the live-action settings with the more produced portraits. We tried to choose live images that looked as if they could be an ad or featured in an editorial story, which helped bring the two together.
Matt’s edit is now much more polished with content that can make a client confident in hiring him for his specific style. With a few more minor tweaks, we were able to clean up the website and make it more sophisticated as a whole.
View more of Matt Odom’s work on his website.
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