How to get commercial photography clients when "build your portfolio" isn't working

Every guide on how to get commercial photography clients gives you the same four answers. Build a portfolio. Pick a niche. Post more. Go to networking events.

None of them tell you who to email on Monday morning.

That's the gap you're standing in. You're not short on advice about looking hireable. You're short on a name, an inbox, and a reason to write to it. Until you have those three, work arrives when it feels like arriving, which is the real problem: you have no idea if you're shooting anything in six weeks.

The two commercial clients that changed things for me both came from me going out and finding them. Neither went the way the guides describe. The first one didn't pay me. The second came from an email that didn't work.

The standard advice isn't wrong. It's just not the part that gets you hired.

A portfolio is table stakes. It closes the deal once someone is already interested. It is not the thing that makes them interested.

A photographer on r/videography put it like this:

People don't hire the best photographer, they hire the photographer they like best.

Read that as a warning, not as comfort. Being liked isn't a personality contest you win by posting more. It's a relationship, and a relationship with a company that has never heard of you starts with you paying attention to them first, before you ask for anything.

That attention is work. It happens before you hit send, and it's the part nobody writes about.

My first commercial client didn't pay me

I was traveling. I wanted a brand deal, mostly because I was on the road and I wanted the trip to mean something. So I sent Instagram DMs to surf camps in Morocco.

Not one message. Several messages, to several camps. And I was learning how to write the message as I sent them.

One said yes. Here's the part that never makes it into a "get clients" post: the first job was an exchange. Not money. Content for the experience.

The second time was for money. That's when we started working month to month. We still work together. They're still my client today.

I'm not telling you to work for free, and I'm not going to pretend an exchange is a business model. What matters is the order of events. I found them. I wrote to them, badly, while learning. The money showed up on the second round, and the client I've kept longest is the one that started with no invoice at all.

Where the list actually comes from

I didn't find those surf camps in a directory. I pitched them because I'm a surf fanatic.

I travel, I make content for brands while I do it, and surf is the thing I'm obsessed with. So when I decided I wanted a brand deal, the companies I could already name without looking anything up were surf camps.

That's the "who." Not a database. The world you already know better than the people selling to it.

And it isn't sentimental, it's what makes the rest of this possible. You cannot tell whether a company's photos are worse than their ambition if you don't know what that industry is supposed to look like. What does a good surf camp feed look like? Is this place selling the waves or the vibe? What would make me book here instead of the one down the beach? I could answer all of that before I ever picked up a camera for them, because I had been the customer.

A stranger working from a list can see that the photos are bad. He can't see what the photos are failing to do.

It's also why my message didn't read as spam. I wasn't an outsider guessing what they needed. Both clients in this article are surf companies. That isn't a coincidence, it's the method.

So open the list you already have in your head. The sport, the scene, the industry you'd talk about for an hour at a bar without checking your phone. Those are the companies you can actually judge, and the ones you can write to without pretending.

Now the limit, because this isn't infinite. There are only so many surf companies. Eventually you exhaust the world you know and you have to learn a new one, which is slower and it shows in the work. But that's a problem for client twenty. Right now you're not short on companies. You're short on companies you understand.

Who's actually worth an email

You have a list now. Most of it still isn't worth your time. Here's what I check:

I look at whether they have room for me to come in as an audiovisual producer, whether there's an improvement to make from my side. That's the first thing I look at. Based on the quality of their photos, and whether they have any kind of strategy.

Two signals, and the word doing the work is room.

A company already producing beautiful, consistent work doesn't have room for you. You'd be a lateral move. A company whose photos are visibly behind what they're trying to be, that's room. The second signal tells you whether they'd even notice: if there's no strategy at all behind what they post, you're not selling an upgrade, you're selling an idea they haven't had yet. That's a much longer conversation.

You're looking for the company whose photos are worse than their ambition.

What I look at before I write

Once a company passes that check, the research starts. Honestly: I spent a lot of time looking manually at the kind of content they have, what the company is putting out visually, whether there's an opening where I can come in and give better quality, or what proposal could improve the attention they get.

That's the whole job, and I won't dress it up. It's slow. There's no five minute version of it that also works.

Here's the part that took me longest to understand, though. That research doesn't go in the email. The email is three sentences. The research is what tells you the email is worth sending at all, and it's what you actually talk about once they pick up the phone.

Most people have it backwards. They skip the looking, then try to make up for it with a longer email.

Don't send a price list. Sell the meeting.

What's worked for me is selling the meeting. A personal conversation. You don't offer a price list. Give value first, connect emotionally after.

Here's the actual email. Client names redacted, everything else exactly as I send it:

I've worked with [company] and [company], producing high-quality photography and promotional & testimonials videos that highlight [region] destinations helping to boost their amount of bookings.

If this is of interest, I can send you more details or we can jump in a quick call.

We would love to find the way to work with you.

Three sentences. That's the whole thing.

Notice what isn't in there. No reel. No day rate. No paragraph about my passion for storytelling. And no essay about their brand either.

Here's what it does, in order.

It proves I've done this in their world. Two companies from their industry, named. Not a portfolio link and a hope.

It names their number. Not "beautiful content." Bookings. That's the metric the person reading this gets asked about by their own boss, and it's the only reason they'd care that I own a camera.

It asks for a call, not a job. A quick call is a small yes. Everything else is a big one.

Now the part the template won't tell you, and this is why I'm showing you mine instead of writing you a clean one.

It works for certain cases, and the case is written into it. It speaks to businesses whose number is bookings: camps, hotels, destinations. If you shoot for a manufacturer, "bookings" is the wrong word and the whole thing collapses.

And notice where that limit lives. It isn't in the blanks. It's in the words I never change. Everyone copying a template obsesses over what goes in the gaps, but the fixed words are the ones deciding who this email can be sent to at all.

And it only works if you can fill it in honestly. If you've never worked with anyone in their world, there is nothing to put where those two company names sit, and the email turns back into a claim about you.

Which is the real reason that first job matters more than what it paid. It wasn't a credential. It was the sentence I got to write to the next company.

The email that failed, and then got me a full time job

The email that got me a full time salary didn't work when I sent it.

It went to another surf company, this one in Portugal, premium end of the market. I asked about work as a videographer. It didn't get me the job. Not then.

A few months later, they wrote to me. They had my portfolio. That turned into a full time salary.

Sit with that, because it breaks the advice you've been given. Every outreach guide tells you to follow up twice and move on. If they don't reply in a week, it's a no. That would have made the Portugal email a failure, and I'd have filed it under "cold email doesn't work" and gone back to waiting for referrals.

The email didn't fail. It landed in a month when they weren't hiring, and it sat in an inbox with my portfolio attached to it until the month they were.

This is the honest answer to feast or famine, and it isn't a cadence I can hand you. The work you do now pays out on a delay you don't control. Which means the only version of this that works is sending before you need it. If you start writing to companies in the month your calendar is empty, you're already late by however long their hiring cycle happens to be.

The question nobody asks

If a photographer starting today could ask me one thing, I don't think it's "where do I find companies." I think the question they're missing is whether they have the right experience to ask for the price they'd like to charge.

More hours of experience will take you faster to a price list higher than we think it will. And the sooner you start, the better.

Look at my own arc: an exchange in Morocco, then money from the same company, then a premium salary in Portugal. The exchange wasn't a discount I regret. It was hours. The price came later, and it came because the hours existed first.

So the answer to how to find commercial photography clients isn't really a directory. It's starting the clock, on purpose, this month, with companies you already understand.

Where Avag fits

Avag doesn't pick your world for you. It can't, and if it could you shouldn't let it. That choice is the one thing here that has to come from you, because it's what gives you the standing to judge anyone.

What it does is the slow part. Once you know which industry you can actually read, going company by company by hand to see if there's room for you is the bit I got tired of doing tab by tab. So I built the thing I wanted: Avag scores whether a company fits what you shoot and at what rates, and does the looking before you write, so the observation you open with is already waiting for you.

It doesn't edit your photos, it doesn't deliver your galleries, and it won't have the conversation for you. The judgment in that fit check is still yours. So is the relationship, and that was always the part that closed the job anyway.

If you shoot commercial work, that scoring and research step is exactly what it does: see how it works for photographers.