Better business photos with the phone in your pocket

There is a moment on almost every website project where the build stops and waits. The layout is done, the copy is written, and the whole thing is holding for photographs that never arrive. Meanwhile the temptation grows to fill the gaps with stock images — the smiling call-centre woman, the anonymous handshake, the four colleagues pointing at a laptop.

Visitors recognise stock photography instantly, and it costs you more than it saves. It signals that you had nothing real to show. Your phone camera is genuinely good enough. What is usually missing is twenty minutes of technique.

Light does 80% of the work

Amateur photos and professional photos are usually shot on similar equipment now. The difference is nearly always light.

• Best: the golden hour. The hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset. Low, warm, directional light that flatters buildings, vehicles and faces.
• Reliable: bright overcast. A grey day is a giant softbox. Colours stay true and there are no harsh shadows. Most exterior work photos are best taken on a cloudy day.
• Usable: open shade. The shaded side of a building on a sunny day, facing out toward the open sky.
• Avoid: midday sun. Overhead light produces black shadows under eaves, in eye sockets and inside every recess.
• Avoid: mixed indoor light. A room lit by a window and a warm ceiling bulb produces two different colour casts your phone cannot reconcile. Turn the lights off and use the window.

The five shots every local business needs

1. 01The hero: your work, finished, in good lightOne wide shot of a completed job. Tidy the frame first — move the ladder, coil the hose, remove the drink cans. Shoot from about chest height, straight on, so vertical lines stay vertical. This becomes your home page image.
2. 02The detail: proof of careGet close on the part a customer would never photograph themselves: the clean cut, the sealed joint, the finished edge. Detail shots argue for your standards more convincingly than any sentence about quality.
3. 03The person: you, workingHave someone photograph you mid-task, not posed with folded arms. Looking at what you are doing, in your own workwear, in your own van or shop. This is the photo that makes a stranger comfortable letting you into their house.
4. 04The before-and-after pairShoot the before from a fixed position — note where your feet are and what is in the corners of the frame. Return to the same spot for the after. Matching framing is what makes the pair convincing; a before shot from a different angle looks like a trick.
5. 05The place: where you areYour storefront, your van outside a recognisable local building, your team on a job in town. Local visual context reassures local customers that you are actually nearby, in a way that a written address does not.

Composition, in four rules

1. Fill the frame. The most common mistake is standing too far back. If the subject occupies less than half the frame, take three steps forward and shoot again.
2. Shoot at eye level. Chest height for objects, eye height for people. Photos taken from adult standing height looking down at something on the ground make everything look small and incidental.
3. Watch the edges before you press the button. Scan the four edges of the frame for a bin, a cable, a stray foot. Ten seconds of tidying saves an unusable photo.
4. Keep verticals vertical. Turn on your phone's grid overlay and line up door frames and wall corners with it. Leaning buildings are the clearest signal of a snapshot.

Preparing photos for the web

This is where good photos are ruined for a different reason. A modern phone photo is 4 to 12 MB. Put six of those on a page and it will take fifteen seconds to load on a phone on rural cellular data, and most visitors will be gone before the images render.

1. 01Crop before you exportCrop to the shape the page needs — usually 3:2 or 16:9 for headers, square for cards. Cropping in the browser with CSS still downloads the whole image.
2. 02Resize to the largest size actually displayedThere is no benefit to a 4000px image in a 1200px slot. Every pixel above what is displayed is download time spent on nothing.
3. 03CompressSquoosh.app is free, runs in the browser and uploads nothing. Export as WebP at around 75% quality. The difference is usually invisible and the file is often 80% smaller.
4. 04Name the file descriptively'eavestrough-cleaning-chatham-before-after.webp' rather than 'IMG_4471.HEIC'. File names are a small, free ranking signal in image search, and they make your own media library navigable a year later.
5. 05Write the alt text as you uploadDescribe what is in the image for someone who cannot see it: 'Cleaned eavestrough on a red brick bungalow in Chatham'. Purely decorative images get empty alt text so screen readers skip them.

Permission and honesty

• Ask before photographing a customer's property, and again before publishing. A text message saying yes is enough, and worth keeping.
• Never publish an image that shows a house number, licence plate or alarm panel without asking.
• Do not present someone else's work as your own, including manufacturer photos of a product you install.
• Do not use editing to change what the work actually looks like. Straightening and light correction are fine; removing a defect is not.