How to take good photos for your website with a phone

The phone in your pocket is good enough to take every photo your website needs. What makes a photo look professional is not the camera but four things you control: the light, where you stand, what is in the background and whether the picture shows something a customer cares about. Here is how to get each one right in an ordinary working day, without a photographer.

Start by cleaning the lens

It sounds too simple to matter, but a phone lens lives in a pocket and picks up a film of grease from your fingers. That film makes every photo look hazy and makes lights glow. Wipe the lens with a soft cloth or the corner of a clean shirt before you start. Do it every time you take pictures for the site.

While you are at it, check two settings once:

Turn the grid on. On an iPhone it is in Settings, then Camera, then Grid. On most Android phones it is in the camera app's settings. The grid draws two lines across and two down, which helps you keep walls straight and the horizon level.
Leave the zoom alone. On most phones, pinching to zoom just crops the picture and loses detail. Walk closer instead. If your phone has a "2x" or "3x" button, that one uses a separate lens and is fine.

Light: the thing that matters most

Good light hides a lot of other mistakes. Bad light ruins a photo no phone can fix.

Outdoors, avoid the middle of the day. Hard noon sun makes deep shadows under eaves, under hat brims and under people's eyes. Early morning, late afternoon or a bright overcast day give soft, even light. A roofer, a landscaper or a pressure-washing crew will get better pictures of the same job at four in the afternoon than at noon.

Indoors, turn toward the window. Put the window behind you or beside you, not behind the thing you are photographing. A cake on a counter in front of a bright window comes out as a dark shape. Turn so the window light falls on it.

Switch off mixed lights. A room lit by daylight, a yellow ceiling bulb and a blue fluorescent tube gives odd colors. If there is enough daylight, turn the indoor lights off.

Skip the flash for most website photos. It flattens everything and puts a shiny spot on every surface. The exception is a dark corner where you need to show detail, like the inside of a cabinet.

Where to stand: angles that help customers

A customer looking at your site wants to understand what they would get. Your angle should help them see it.

Hold the phone at chest height and level for rooms, storefronts and finished work. Tilting up or down makes walls lean, which reads as careless.
Step back for the whole job, then step in for the detail. A kitchen remodel needs one photo of the room and two or three close ones: the joint where the countertop meets the wall, the inside of a drawer, the tile edge. The close photos are what prove the quality.
Shoot from where the customer stands. For a shop, take the front from across the street, the way someone sees it walking up. That photo doubles as directions.
Horizontal for most photos. Wide pictures fit the top of a page and most galleries. Take a vertical one as well when something is tall, like a staircase, a tree or a wedding cake.

Clear the background

Look at the edges of the screen before you press the button. That is where clutter hides: the trash bin by the driveway, a ladder leaning on the truck, coffee cups on the counter, a pile of invoices next to the register. Move them out of the frame or move yourself. It takes a minute and turns a snapshot into a photo you can put at the top of a page.

For small products, a plain wall or a large sheet of white poster board near a window makes a clean background for almost nothing.

People: the photos most sites are missing

Customers want to see who will show up at their door or stand behind the counter. One good photo of you and your team often does more for trust than ten photos of equipment.

Ask first, every time. Get a yes from staff before their photo goes online, and a clear yes from any customer who appears, in writing if you can. If a customer's face, house number or license plate is in a job photo, ask or crop it out.
Show people working, not posing. A baker shaping dough, a mechanic under a hood, a groomer with a dog on the table. Take a few in a row so you get one where nobody is blinking.
For a portrait, find open shade. Stand the person just inside a doorway or under a porch roof, facing the light. Hold the phone at their eye level, not below. Use portrait mode if your phone has it, which softens the background.
Keep work clothes on. Your uniform, shirt with the logo or apron says more than a borrowed blazer.

If you are building a page about your people, introducing your team on your website covers what to write next to those photos.

Work in progress: the photos only you can take

The finished job is only half the story. Photos taken during the work show the care that customers cannot see later: the new framing before the drywall, the wiring before the cover goes on, the layer of underlayment before the shingles, the drainage gravel before the patio stones.

Make it a habit to take three photos on every job:

Before, from a spot you can find again.
During, showing the part that gets covered up.
After, from the exact same spot as the before photo.

That same spot matters. If you want to use the pairs on your site, before-and-after photos that show your work explains how to line them up and caption them.

Getting the photos off your phone

Website photos do not need to be huge, but they should start out sharp. A few habits help:

Send the original, not a text-message copy. Texting a photo usually shrinks and blurs it. Use AirDrop, a shared Google Photos or iCloud album, or email it as an attachment with "actual size" chosen.
Do light edits only. Straighten, crop and maybe brighten a little with the phone's built-in editor. Skip filters: they make your work look a different color from what customers will get.
Name a folder for the website on your phone or computer and move the keepers there, so you are not hunting through thousands of pictures later.
Delete the near-copies. Pick the best of each set. Five strong photos beat twenty that look alike.

What to do this week

Clean your lens and turn on the grid.
Take one photo of your storefront, truck or workspace in soft light, with the clutter moved out of the frame.
Take one photo of you at work and one of each person on your team who agrees to it.
On your next job, take a before, a during and an after from the same spots.
Put the best ten in one folder and look at them on your phone next to your current website photos.

If your current site is full of stock pictures or old photos and you want to see how your own would look on a modern page, you can see your site rebuilt first and swap the photos in once you like the result.