Shot on the phone you already have
How to take photos for your website
What gives a new business away is not the writing, it is the pictures. A visitor who recognises a stock photograph of somebody else’s shop has already decided you are not really open. The good news is that the phone in your pocket, used in the right light, takes photographs that are more than good enough for a first website. This page breaks the job into six steps: what to shoot, when to shoot it, how to set the camera, how to frame a picture that will have text sitting on top of it, how to choose between the frames, and what to do to a file before it goes anywhere near the site.
Allow about half a day: two to three hours of shooting, split between a morning indoors and an hour near sunset outside, plus one to two hours the same evening to choose, resize and rename — then a short second shoot a week later, because you only see which pictures are missing once they are on the page.
Have these ready before you start.
- The phone itself, prepared. Wipe the lens with a cloth — a fingerprint puts a milky haze over every frame, and this is the highest-return thirty seconds of the whole job. Charge past seventy per cent, and clear at least five gigabytes of space; twenty minutes of shooting at full quality will eat a gigabyte without trying.
- A written shot list with a number against every line. Do not invent the list — open the layout you are going to use and count the photo slots in it: the wide image at the top, one per service or per dish, and however many the gallery takes. Shooting to that count is what stops you coming home with forty pictures and no photograph of the front door.
- The place and the people, sorted out in advance. Clear everything the camera will see: bins, cardboard, extension leads, personal things on the counter, the notice taped up crooked. If a member of staff or a customer will be recognisable, ask first and get the permission in writing. Prepare the products or the dishes the way a customer actually receives them.
List the photographs you actually need
Do not walk around with the phone and see what happens. Write the list first. A first website usually needs the front door with the sign and the entrance clearly readable, so a stranger can find you; one or two wide shots of the inside; one photograph per service or per headline dish; at least one with a person in it, you or a member of staff, looking at the camera; and one or two close details that show texture or craft. Put a number against each line and expect ten to fifteen finished images in total. On the day, take three to five frames of every item from the same position — pressing the button four times costs nothing, and it is the difference between choosing and settling. Keep the list open on the phone and tick items off as you go, because that is the only reliable way not to discover at home that nobody photographed the shopfront.
Pick the time of day, because the light decides most of it
An overcast day is the easiest light there is: soft, no hard shadows, nobody squinting. Bright midday sun is the hardest, because it comes straight down and everything under the sign goes black. Shoot outside within an hour of sunrise or an hour of sunset, when the light arrives at an angle. Shoot inside during the day, with the subject near a window and facing it; a subject with the window behind them becomes a silhouette. The fastest way to ruin a whole batch is mixed light — daylight from a window and warm ceiling bulbs in the same frame, which no automatic white balance can reconcile, so half the picture goes yellow whatever you do. Choose one source: switch the ceiling lights off and shoot on window light during the day, or wait until dark and shoot on room light alone. Before the exterior shots, look at what is parked and stacked in front of the building, and move it.
Set the camera up once, it takes two minutes
Open the camera settings and turn the grid on; you will use it for every horizon and every door frame from now on. Choose the highest quality setting available. On an iPhone, Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible gives you JPG files instead of HEIC and saves a conversion later. Turn the flash off, and turn Live Photos off so each press is one file. Never use the digital zoom — walk closer instead. Use the 1x main lens for anything with a person in it; the 0.5x ultra-wide stretches faces and bends the edges of a room, and is worth reaching for only when you physically cannot step back. Before each shot, tap the screen on your subject to set focus, then pull the exposure slider down slightly so a bright window does not blow out. Hold the phone in both hands with your elbows against your body, or rest it on a counter and use the three-second timer or the volume button. Use portrait mode sparingly: the blur is calculated rather than real, it regularly eats the edge of somebody’s hair, and it is fine for one product on a table but not for the picture at the top of your home page.
Frame it with empty space, because text will sit on top
The wide image at the top of a page usually carries the headline and a button over it, so leave somewhere for them to go: put the subject to one side and keep plain wall, table or sky on the other. That empty area has to be genuinely plain and even in brightness, because words over a pattern or over clutter are unreadable no matter what the design does to them. Shoot the same subject twice, once with the subject left of centre and once right, since you do not yet know which side the layout puts the text on. Then leave margin: the same image is cropped tall on a mobile device and very wide on a desktop, so keep about fifteen per cent clear around the subject on every side, or the phone version will cut somebody’s head off. Shoot wider than you think you need — you can crop in later and you cannot crop out. Keep horizons level and door frames vertical, because a tilted frame is the most visible amateur signature there is; hold the phone at chest height and square to the subject rather than standing over it and pointing down. And let one picture say one thing: one dish, not the whole table.
Choose ruthlessly, and do it in one sitting
Choose the same day, because after three days you will not remember which frame was which. Do it on a big screen — a phone screen makes everything look sharp. First pass, delete only: zoom to one hundred per cent and check the thing that has to be sharp, the eyes or the edge of the plate; blurred goes, blinked goes, and of four frames from the same position exactly one survives. Second pass, put the survivors side by side and ask whether they look like the same business, because consistency across the set matters more than any single picture being good; if one is noticeably more yellow or darker than the rest, correct it or drop it. Third pass, check the survivors against the list from step one — every slot filled, and no slot with two pictures competing. Edit with a light hand: straighten, crop, and make small exposure and white balance corrections, all of which the phone’s built-in editor or the photo app on your computer will do. Avoid heavy filters, which date quickly and make food look fake. Above all, do not edit a product into something the customer will not receive; a portion that looks nothing like the one you serve buys you a complaint, not a sale.
Resize, strip the location, and rename before you upload
A phone original is typically 4,000 px wide and 3–6 MB, and uploading it as-is means every customer downloads all of that over mobile data for no reason. Six things to do to each file, in this order. 1. Resize it: 2,000 px wide is plenty for the big image at the top, 1,200–1,600 px for pictures inside a page, 600–800 px for thumbnails. 2. Check the file size afterwards: under 300 KB for the big one and under 150 KB for the rest are reasonable targets. 3. Choose the format: JPEG at quality 80 is the safe default, WebP is smaller at the same apparent quality and current browsers all read it, and PNG is for logos and flat graphics rather than photographs. 4. Convert iPhone HEIC files to JPG. 5. Strip the location, because phones write GPS coordinates into the file and somebody trading from home publishes their home address along with the picture: on an iPhone use Options in the share sheet and turn Location off, and on Android most gallery apps have the same switch in their share settings; many resizing tools drop it as a side effect, but check rather than assume. 6. Rename it: lower case, hyphens, no spaces, no accented characters, and a description of what is in the file. Something like storefront-evening.jpg beats IMG_4821.jpg, because the filename ends up in the page's web address and because you will want to find this file again in two years. Keep the untouched originals in a separate folder named with the date of the shoot, and do not edit them. A site builder may compress again on its own, but handing it a 4,000 px original is handing over the decision.
Four things to do once the photos are live.
- Open the live page on a phone, outdoors, in daylight, and look at what the crop did to each photograph. The same wide image is cropped to a different shape on a phone than on a desktop, so a head, a sign or a plate that sat comfortably in the middle can be cut in half on one of them. Re-crop and re-upload the ones that lost something — the live page does not change until you publish again.
- Turn the office wifi off, load the same page over mobile data, and time it. If the photographs arrive one visibly after another, or the page is still grey after three or four seconds, they are still too big: go back through step six with a smaller target and publish again. First websites are slow for one reason far more often than any other, and it is the photographs.
- Put the same set on the listings customers actually use — your Google Business Profile, whichever other map app people near you open, your social accounts, any delivery platform you are on — so every one of them looks like the same business. Upload the larger version to those, not the compressed web copy: they resize on their own, and a file that has been through compression twice shows it.
- Keep the untouched originals somewhere that is not the phone — an external drive, a cloud folder, ideally both — in a folder named with the date of the shoot. Then set a reminder to reshoot after a refit, a new menu, a new uniform, or a change of season that makes the view through the window look wrong. Photographs age faster than sentences do.
Questions that come up
Do I need to hire a photographer?
Not for a first version. A phone photograph of your actual place, taken in decent light, does more for a stranger deciding whether you really exist than a professional photograph of somewhere else does. A photographer earns the fee in specific places: food that needs styling to photograph like what you serve, products shot on white for a catalogue, a group portrait where everyone has to look good at once, and anything that will be printed large. A sensible order is to shoot everything yourself now, live with it for a season, then pay someone for the three or four images that carry the most weight.
Can I use stock photos I found online?
Not for your own premises, your own work, your team or your products. The visitor is checking whether you exist, and a stock interior of a shop that is not yours answers that question the wrong way — people recognise these images more often than you would expect. There is also the licence: found in an image search is not a licence, and using a photograph you have no rights to can end in a bill rather than a warning. Stock is defensible for something clearly decorative, such as a texture behind a section or an illustration on an article, and only with a licence you could produce if somebody asked for it.
My photos come out yellow, or too dark. What do I fix?
Yellow is almost always mixed light: daylight through a window and warm ceiling bulbs in the same frame, which no automatic white balance can resolve. Pick one and remove the other — switch the ceiling lights off and shoot near the window during the day, or shoot after dark on room light alone. Too dark is usually the phone exposing for a bright window behind your subject; tap the screen on the subject’s face or the plate, then drag the exposure slider up until the subject looks right and let the window blow out. If a whole batch came out the same shade of yellow, correct the white balance on one image in the editor and apply the same correction to the rest, so the set still looks like one place.
The shop is not open yet. What is there to photograph?
Photograph the work rather than the room. Hands doing the thing you are selling, the tools laid out, the materials you buy, one finished product on a clean surface near a window, and a portrait of you looking at the camera. If the fit-out is under way, photograph that too — the sign going up, the first delivery, the shelves filling — and date them, because a place that is visibly being built is a place people will follow. What not to do is publish a page whose only content is the words coming soon: put the real opening date, the address and a way to reach you on it, and swap the construction photographs out the week you open.
Before you shoot anything, open the starting layout for your line of work and count what it asks for: how many photo slots there are, and which of them are wide and which are tall. Shoot to that list and every picture you take has somewhere to go, and you will not get home to find that the image at the top needed to be landscape. Naratake has 40 industry starting layouts, they open in a browser, and you can look at one before deciding anything. What each plan includes is on the pricing page.
See the layouts for your industry