Web Edit: A Clean Renovation for Helynn Ospina

Helynn Ospina is a freelance San Francisco-based photographer who specializes in home/garden and travel photography. She reached out to us earlier in the year looking for guidance with taking her career to the next level. As with many photographers in the beginning stages of their profession, we started the consulting process in our marketing department with a customized plan to help her get a grasp on where her career stands and the best way to move forward. One of the stages outlined in the BAM! Plan was a professional web edit to help her fine-tune the range of work being shown on her site and present it in an organized, client-friendly manner. Our goal with her edit was to highlight her skills and strengths, promote a cohesive vision and style, improve her organizational structure, and promote only her most commercially viable imagery on the site.

We started off our work together with a Skype call to discuss her background in photography, the type of clients she’s worked for in the past, and the clients she would like to work for in the future. We had suggested regional home/garden clients such as CA Home + Design, and Sunset magazine for her interior work. She had mentioned her interest in doing work for travel publications such as AFAR and Departures, which we thought were both in line with the work she’s developing in the travel genre. After taking this information into consideration along with the guidelines mentioned in her BAM! Plan, we decided to move forward and consolidate her site to focus on her well-developed Interior work, as well as her auspicious and atmospheric travel imagery. Rather than risk showing generalization over specialization, we agreed to focus on creating concise edits promoting these two fields and eliminate her less-developed work.

During the entire editing process, Helynn was engaged, responsive and proactive. She would send us links to photographers that inspired her, magazine edits she found striking, and even image pairings that she had put together on her own. We really appreciated her involvement in the process as it showed how connected she was to her work as well as her dedication to representing it properly as we helped her revamp her brand.

Helynn’s new home page launches to a grid view of her interiors work, which is the first gallery in her new site’s navigation menu.

With this gallery, I focused on creating one cohesive flow from the first image to the last, highlighting her skills and the various style interiors she has photographed. Color gradation and spatial variation played an integral part in the organization of this gallery.

Helynn’s travel work was divided into two separate galleries for her new edit. Although we could have easily created one smaller edit from all of the work she’d initially sent over, we decided it would be more effectively presented as two: one with a cooler essence, and one with more of a warmer feel.

The “Down South” gallery is indicative of Helynn’s most recent work and shows imagery from her travels in South America. 

The “Out West” gallery emphasizes Helynn’s earlier work on the pacific coast and Hawaii. The oceanic imagery and earthy, mountainous terrains allude to the cooler feeling of this gallery.

The last gallery on Helynn’s site is meant to highlight her project-based work. Since she’s no longer devoting a specific gallery to portraiture, this gallery of conceptual portraits is able to hint at her skills and abilities without detracting from her primary specialties.

After the edit was complete, we sent the sequenced pdfs over to Helynn along with some notes and suggestions for her portfolio development moving forward. She was very pleased with the work we had done for her and wrote a great testimonial about working with Wonderful Machine on her blog. You can check out the before and after screencast below:

See it live at helynnospina.com.

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