A photographer's portfolio site has one job that's easy to get wrong in a subtle way: get out of the way of the actual photographs, while still being fast, navigable, and easy for a potential client to act on.
Where photography portfolios commonly go wrong
Image weight killing load speed. Photography sites are the single most common category to ship oversized, poorly-optimized images, because the instinct is "these need to look as good as possible" — which is true, but a 15MB uncompressed image doesn't actually look better on a typical screen than a well-compressed 500KB one; it just loads slower. See our post on Framer image optimization for what a properly optimized export actually improves.
Navigation that buries the contact path. A visitor who's decided they want to hire you shouldn't have to hunt for how — a clear, present contact path (not just an email buried in an about page) matters more than one more gallery.
Inconsistent aspect ratios breaking a grid layout. A portfolio grid mixing wildly different aspect ratios without a deliberate layout system looks unintentionally chaotic rather than curated — worth either cropping consistently or choosing a template layout built to handle mixed ratios gracefully.
No categorization for a large body of work. Past a certain volume of work, an undifferentiated single gallery becomes hard to browse — categories (by shoot type, by client, by year) help a visitor find relevant work faster than scrolling everything.
What actually sells the work
Curation matters more than volume. A tightly-edited selection of your strongest 15-20 images outperforms an exhaustive 200-image dump, because it signals editorial judgment — itself a skill clients are implicitly evaluating.
A structurally sound starting point
This site's free photography portfolio template is built specifically around this use case — clean grid layout, CMS support for adding new work without rebuilding pages, and a straightforward contact path — worth checking the live demo directly against your own work before customizing.