When I was working my way up the ranks from "novice professional photographer" to "struggling photographer" I used to spend a lot of time and money on hand-made leather portfolios to show off to art directors across the country. Wanting to hit more than one AD at a time, I had several of these expensive-yet-pretty photo binders and they traveled around carrying expensive-yet-pretty mounted prints of my work.

One of the things I'm most thankful for about digital photography is that it has replaced the need to have a physical representation of one's work (or in the case of most photographers, several) with the ability to showcase one's work online. Now, I still prefer the look of a printed piece—first of all there's no chance that a poorly adjusted monitor will make your images look bad, but thanks to online photo galleries it's simple to change a gallery on the fly for the needs of the person seeing it.

I think of this because of the new photo gallery tool fotograft.com, which is yet another contestant in the world of digital photographic display. Others among them include LiveBooks.com (fair disclosure, LiveBooks support the Aperture Road Tour classes that I teach), and on the consumer end sites like Photoshop Express and Apple's .Mac based web galleries available through iPhoto and Aperture.

fotograft.com creates really beautiful looking web galleries, definitely designed for the professional photographer. They come, however with a pretty high price tag. A non-customizable site is $499 to start, with $30 a month storage charges, and up to 2GB of space. That's a bit steep, but it's cheaper than hiring a web developer to make a custom site from scatch. (LiveBooks.com, who—and remember I work with them—starts at $800 for a custom site) comes out to a similar price range.

That's still a lot cheaper than the leather-bound books I used to have made. Between $500 and $1000 (including all materials to make and mount the prints) a book, a photographer needed more than one in circulation at a time. That's a pretty hefty investment.

Regardless of the service used, showing off one's photographs online is a great way to promote one's work—you never know when something might come up that requires shooting off a link to a beautiful gallery somewhere. Even a single job can easily pay for the cost of the gallery provider.

With more competition in the market, we're looking forward to dropping prices and increased service, and looking forward to never having to make a leather portfolio again.