How to photograph your own work with a phone

The most convincing thing on a local business website is a photo of the actual work. Not a stock image of a smiling stranger, but your kitchen install, your plate, your haircut, your finished deck. Customers can tell the difference instantly, and real photos answer their biggest question: what will I actually get?

You do not need a photographer for most of it. You need a phone, some light and a few habits.

Start with light

Light matters more than the camera.

• Indoors, use daylight. Open the blinds, turn off overhead lights that tint everything yellow or green, and shoot with the window beside you or behind you, not in the frame.
• Outdoors, avoid harsh midday sun. Overcast days are your friend: soft light, no hard shadows. Early morning and late afternoon look warm and flattering.
• Clean the lens. Your phone lives in a pocket. Wipe it on your shirt. It is the single quickest improvement there is.

Frame it like you mean it

Hold the phone level and shoot straight on, from about chest height. Turn on the grid lines in your camera settings to keep edges straight. They only show on your screen, not in the photo.

For every job, take three shots:

1. The wide shot. The whole room, the whole storefront, the whole plate. Context.
2. The middle shot. The main feature, filling most of the frame.
3. The detail. The clean grout line, the stitching, the garnish. This is where craft shows.

Shoot horizontal for your website, which mostly uses wide images, and vertical for social media. When in doubt, take both.

Before and after, from the same spot

Before and after pairs are the strongest proof a trade or service business can show, but only if they match. Stand in the same place, at the same height, with the same zoom. A piece of tape on the floor marks the spot for the after shot.

A before and after taken from the same spot proves the work. Taken from different spots, it only proves you were there twice.

People and privacy

Hands at work are often more interesting than faces anyway. If you do include people, customers or staff, ask first, and keep a note that they said yes.

Before posting a photo from a customer's home or business, check the frame for house numbers, licence plates, family photos, mail and anything on a screen. Crop or retake. Customers notice when you are careful with their privacy, and it is part of what makes them trust you.

A light edit, not a filter

Straighten, crop, and nudge the brightness if it came out dark. That is usually all. Heavy filters make work look less real, which defeats the point. Keep the colours true: a paint colour or a fabric should look like it does in person.

Getting them onto the website

• Keep the originals in a shared album organized by job.
• Resize copies for the web. Around 2000 pixels on the longest side is plenty. Full size phone photos are far larger than a page needs and slow it down.
• Name files descriptively, such as shingle-replacement-old-south-london.jpg, not IMG_4021.jpg.
• Caption with the job and the place: "Bathroom retile, Byron, three days." That one line proves the work, the area and the timeline at once.
• Describe each photo in its alt text, so people using screen readers know what it shows.

When to hire a photographer

For your homepage hero, team portraits and the few images that set the tone of the whole site, a professional half day is worth it. For the steady stream of real, recent work that keeps your site and profile alive, your phone is the right tool.