Good website photos without a photographer

Everyone recognises stock photography. The smiling team in a glass office that belongs to nobody tells a visitor exactly one thing: there is nothing real to show here. The alternative is not a photographer and a day rate. It is the phone already in your pocket, a window, and twenty minutes of tidying.

Here is how to get there without buying anything.

You need fewer photos than you think

Start with this, because it makes the whole job smaller. One picture of you. Two or three of the work, or the room it happens in. One of the front door, so people know what to look for when they arrive. That set is enough to carry an entire small business website.

Which means you can afford to be ruthless. A slightly crooked photo of your actual workshop beats a flawless photo of somebody else's. And if an image doesn't help a visitor decide to pick up the phone, it isn't earning its place on the page. Delete it.

The background does half the work

The camera sees what your eye stopped noticing years ago: the cardboard box in the corner, the cable across the counter, the charger, last year's promotional calendar. Before you shoot anything, go round the frame corner by corner and take out whatever isn't part of the story.

A two-van electrician doesn't need a studio. One clean van, a plain wall, the logo readable, the ground swept — that's the photo. A bakery shoots the bread shelf in the morning while it's still full, not at closing time with three rolls left on it. A physio clinic clears the treatment room, smooths the sheet, opens the blind.

A plain wall almost always beats "somewhere with character". Character in the background is usually just clutter with better PR.

Then find a window

One rule beats everything else here: shoot in daylight, with whatever you're photographing side-on to a window. Not facing straight into it, or the subject turns into a silhouette. Not with the window behind the camera, or everything goes flat. Side-on. The light shapes what it lands on and you get depth without doing anything clever.

Leave the flash off. It throws hard shadows, drains the colour out of skin, and announces that the picture was taken in a hurry. If the room is genuinely too dark, come back at a different hour rather than forcing it — and don't wait for a sunny day. Overcast is better than bright midday sun, because cloud is a giant softbox.

Outside, for the shopfront or the van or the yard, the hours after sunrise and before sunset are the kindest. At noon the shadows fall hard and straight down, and everyone squints.

The best photo on your site is probably you

Customers want to know who they'd be dealing with. A real photo of you — not a stiff passport shot — is often the most valuable image on the whole site. Stand side-on to a window and have someone shoot from a couple of metres back. Distance is what makes it flattering; a phone held at arm's length exaggerates whatever is closest to it, which is your nose. Then don't take three frames. Take thirty. One of them will be good.

Photos of the work matter just as much. Hands threading cable through a wall. A tray of loaves coming out of the oven. The crew loading up before a job. These explain what you do faster than any paragraph, and they sit well next to copy that says plainly what you do.

If staff or customers are recognisable in a shot, ask them first and keep a short note of it in writing — it saves an awkward conversation later, especially if someone leaves. Rules on image rights and personal data differ by country and keep moving; if you're publishing pictures of identifiable people, get it checked by someone qualified rather than by a blog post.

Six settings, then stop fiddling

• Clean the lens. Obvious, and a very common cause of hazy phone photos — that lens spends half its life in a pocket.
• Turn on the grid. It lives somewhere in your phone's camera settings. It keeps door frames and horizons straight, and crooked photos read as careless immediately.
• Tap, then pull the brightness down. Tap your subject, then drag your finger down until it looks slightly darker than "right". Blown-out highlights can't be recovered; shadows usually can.
• Don't digital-zoom. Walk closer instead. Zoom is just a crop, and it costs you sharpness.
• Shoot both landscape and portrait. Your site needs both. Shoot everything vertical and you'll have nothing that spans a wide banner.
• No filters. In two years the filter will look dated. The photo underneath won't.

One more thing, on file size: phone photos are enormous. Uploaded at full size they drag your pages down, and a slow site quietly loses you customers. Some site builders resize uploads for you and some don't — check yours rather than assume, and shrink the files yourself if you need to.

One bright morning is enough

Pick a morning with decent light. Clean the lens, switch the grid on. Tidy one corner of your premises and shoot it from five angles. Have someone photograph you by a window, thirty times. Then sit down that evening and choose four images — not forty.

Before you commit, look at them on a phone rather than a big screen. That's where most people will see them, and a photo behaves very differently there.