What to photograph for your website, with the phone you already have
Photography is the part of a small business website that is most often outsourced to a stock library and most often noticed by customers. People can tell. A smiling stranger in a spotless workshop reads as a placeholder, and a placeholder where your work should be is a small trust cost on every visit.
The good news is that a modern phone is enough. The gap between a usable business photo and an unusable one is almost never the camera.
The six photos worth having
Most sites need six pictures, not sixty.
1. Your work, finished, in real conditions. The fitted kitchen in the customer's actual house, not a showroom. Imperfect surroundings make it believable.
2. Your work in progress. Hands doing the thing. This is the photo that proves a person does the job, and it is the one almost nobody has.
3. You or your team, looking like yourselves. Not a suit if you never wear one. A visitor is deciding whether to let you into their home.
4. Your premises or your van. It tells people what to look for when you arrive, and it quietly says you are a real business.
5. A before and after pair. The single most persuasive image type for trades, salons, cleaning, and repair. Same angle, same framing, both times.
6. One wide shot with space in it. This becomes your header image. It needs empty area on one side for text to sit.
The four things that make phone photos work
Light from a window, not from above. Ceiling lights cast hard shadows down the face and flatten everything else. Turn the subject towards a window and switch the overhead off. This is the biggest single improvement available and it is free.
Never use the flash. It removes depth and adds a hard shine. If it is too dark for the phone, it is too dark for the photo.
Get closer, then closer again. Almost every amateur photo is taken from too far away. Fill the frame with the thing that matters. Do not zoom, walk.
Tidy the frame, not the room. You do not need a spotless workshop. You need no coffee cup, no cable, and no bin in the shot. Look at the edges of the frame before you press the button. Ten seconds here does more than any filter afterwards.
Two habits that matter more than technique
Shoot every job, briefly. Two photos before, two after, thirty seconds. Most businesses have no library of their own work because nobody was ever in the habit, not because the jobs were not photogenic.
Ask permission and keep it simple. "Do you mind if I take a couple of photos of the finished work for our website?" Almost everyone says yes. Do not photograph people's homes in a way that identifies them without asking.
Before they go on the site
Two practical points, because they cost you visitors otherwise.
Size them down. A photo straight off a phone can be four megabytes. On mobile data that is several seconds of blank screen, and most of your visitors are on a phone. Anything over about 300 kilobytes for a page image is doing damage.
Crop for the phone, not the monitor. A wide shot that looks composed on a desktop often puts the subject off screen on a phone. Check both.
What to skip
Stock photos of people who do not work for you. Handshakes. Anyone in a hard hat pointing at a clipboard. A generic city skyline that is not your city. These are not neutral, they actively signal that there was nothing real to show.
One honest photo of your own work beats a gallery of professional images of somebody else's.
Instinctor resizes and serves images for you, and every image block carries its own settings for desktop, tablet, and phone. The part we cannot do is the part that matters most: take two photos on the next job.
The Instinctor team
