
Editor’s Note: You can jump over to the all new LukeCopping.com now and peruse it as you read through this post, or wait till the link at the end. Either way, make sure you check it out!
I was really bad about updating my portfolio during the pandemic. Really really bad.
I felt an overall lack of motivation for marketing in general, and many of the projects I had been excited to share with clients had their releases pushed back — by a year or more in some cases (some are still tied up with indefinite release dates). I was sitting on some excellent work — images that I loved — and I had no idea when I would be able to let the world know about them. Even new stuff I was shooting for regular clients seemed to be on a longer, more extended release schedule. While I did add some small commercial and editorial projects to my website and social media, It had been a LONG time since I’d done a full-scale re-work of everything.
An influx of new assignments in mid-2022 and the eventual release of a lot of those images towards the start of the new year made me realize that now was a viable and timely moment to make an update to my site that could have some significant impact and provide a lot of marketing content for the next several months as I worked on current projects.
The final catalyst was that as 2022 came to a close, I made a massive change to the visual components of my brand. A new logo, color palette, and overall look came with a shift in the philosophy of how I wanted to present my work. I redesigned the site to put a lot more emphasis on impact and color, letting the bolder images I had been working on stand out.
It was time for a change.

For years I’ve used A Photo Folio to manage my website. I’ve always found it a simple and efficient way of handling various essential tasks, including setting up and managing galleries, SEO management, and hosting hidden galleries so I can show small collections of relevant work to clients privately. It also gives me a ton of fluidity in altering the site’s design. It allows me to change a variety of the site’s design parameters without having to do a total rebuild so that I can constantly evolve the experience for visitors and the presentation of the images as design trends change and new features are released. Since I’m still delighted with the platform after all these years, I decided to continue using them for this site iteration.
The first step in updating the site was the easiest — sitting down and assessing what was working and what wasn’t with the current mix of work. What could I leverage, and what needed to be reevaluated? Did I need to recategorize work? Add content focused on specific areas to make the site more appealing to certain clients? Were there any images that I knew deep down I needed to retire?
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