Photography for a small business

Why your phone is enough

A modern phone camera is more than adequate for a website, where images are displayed small and compressed anyway. The limiting factor on almost every business photograph is light and framing, not the sensor behind them.

What a professional brings is consistency, lighting and an eye, and those matter most for a brand where appearance is the product. For showing that a job was done well, your own photographs are both sufficient and more credible.

They are also the only images that can exist. Nobody else was at that job, which makes this the one category of content a competitor genuinely cannot copy from you.

Light does most of the work

Daylight, from the side, with the main light behind you rather than behind the subject. That single rule fixes the majority of unusable photographs taken on real jobs, and it costs nothing but turning around.

Avoid shooting into a window, which turns everything in front of it into a silhouette. If the room is dark and you cannot add light, shoot from the doorway with the window to one side instead of ahead.

Overcast days are better than bright sun for outdoor work, because hard shadows hide detail. The day that looks disappointing is frequently the one that photographs best.

Shoot the same way every time

Consistency matters more than any individual frame. A gallery where every photograph is taken from a similar distance and angle reads as deliberate; a mixture of close-ups and wide shots reads as a phone roll.

Pick a habit and keep it: stand back far enough to show context, hold the phone level, and take the same shot from the same spot before and after. Our page on before and after photos covers why that matters most for pairs.

Take more than you need. Storage is free and returning to a finished job is not, so three angles of everything is the cheapest insurance available.

The habits that produce usable photographs

The list below is what separates a set you can publish from a set you scroll past. None of it requires equipment and all of it has to happen at the job rather than afterward.

• Shoot at the end of every job, before packing up
• Daylight where possible, with the light behind you
• Hold the phone level and stand back
• Same position for before and after
• Tidy the frame first, including your own tools
• Three angles of anything worth showing
• Note what the job was while you still remember

Tidy the frame

The commonest fault in trade photography is not the photography. It is a finished job photographed with tools, packaging and dust sheets still in shot, which makes good work look unfinished.

Two minutes of tidying before the photograph is the highest-return effort in this entire subject. The customer sees the tidy version anyway; the photograph should show what they saw.

Check the edges of the frame before pressing the button. Backgrounds are where the avoidable problems sit: a bin, a van door, somebody's washing, a reflection of you in a window.

Permission and identifying detail

Ask before you photograph somebody's property, and get it in writing before you publish. Verbal agreement on the day is not enough when the customer later objects, and it is easy to ask while you are there.

Check for detail you did not notice: house numbers, vehicle plates, post on a worktop, photographs on a wall, people in the background. Those are the things that produce a complaint months later.

Our page on images and copyright covers the records to keep. A line per photograph naming the job and the permission is enough and it will matter eventually.

What to do with them afterward

Resize and compress before uploading. Photographs straight from a phone are far larger than any web page needs, and they are the commonest cause of a slow site on a mobile connection.

Write a real description for each one while you still know what it shows. Our page on alt text covers what that description is for and why the file name is not it.

Then caption them with what the job actually was, since the caption is the only part an answer engine can read. An uncaptioned photograph asks the visitor to guess whether you have done work like theirs, which is the question they came to answer.