The portfolio decides a photography hire, and the resume mostly answers whether you can shoot on a schedule and deliver files a business can use. Commercial clients care about shot count per day, turnaround and retouching, which is exactly the part most photographers leave off.
Commercial and product photographer with 9 years shooting studio and location work, delivering roughly 6,000 retouched images a year. Built an in-house studio that cut per-image cost from 34 to 9 USD and supports 320 new product listings a month.
Here is how to write your own version, and what reviewers in this field check before they believe a number on a page.
The first pass looks for something checkable. Reviewers in this field have read a great deal of confident language attached to nothing, so they skim for a number with a baseline, or a link they can open. Whatever survives that skim is what the rest of the resume gets read against.
Growth claims are only as good as their attribution. Give the baseline, the change, the period and the channel, and say what you actually did to cause it. A campaign that ran alongside a product launch and a price cut should be described honestly, because an experienced interviewer will ask what else was happening. Precise, modest numbers beat spectacular vague ones.
Commercial photography is booked more than hired, and the decision is portfolio plus reliability plus rate. Where it is an employed role, expect a shoot test and questions about lighting, retouching workflow and turnaround. Licensing and usage rights come up in any professional conversation and candidates who are vague about them look inexperienced.
Assistant to photographer to specialist in a genre, then studio ownership or long-term commercial contracts. Repeat commercial clients are worth more than volume of one-off work.
Lead with the outcome, not the adjectives. Marketing resumes suffer more than most from language that sounds impressive and says nothing, and hiring managers in this field have read it all. One sentence on what you do, one sentence on the biggest number you moved, and the reader will keep going.
This field hires on evidence the reviewer can inspect, so make the links easy to find and make sure they still work. Mirror the channels and platforms the posting names, in its wording. Then confirm the file parses cleanly with our free ATS checker.
A summary leading with your strongest attributable result, experience bullets that give the baseline, the change, the period and the channel, a skills and platforms block, education, and links to work a reviewer can open and inspect for themselves.
Hiring runs on evidence the reviewer can inspect: the portfolio, the live links, the numbers, and how you account for what else was happening at the time. Expect to be asked what you would do differently, which is a question about judgement rather than results.
No credential is required. Insurance, equipment ownership and a clear licensing model function as the professional credentials. Specialist areas such as aerial work carry their own regulatory requirements.
The first number on the page, and whether it can be attributed to you. Reviewers here have read a great deal of impressive language attached to nothing, so one specific result with its baseline earns more attention than any summary paragraph.
Terms that commonly appear in postings for this role include: studio lighting, product photography, Capture One, Adobe Lightroom, retouching, tethered capture, colour management, digital asset management. Include a term only where you have genuinely done the work behind it, and write it the way the posting writes it rather than the way your last employer did.
One page under roughly ten years of experience, two pages beyond that. A two-page resume where every line earns its place beats a padded one-page resume, so cut duties before you cut measurable achievements.
Use the structure and the way each achievement is phrased, but write your own content. The names and employers here are fictional, and a resume describing work you did not do will not survive an interview.
Start from this layout, edit in a live preview with an ATS score as you type, and download as PDF, Word or image — free.
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