Website photography tips: a short brief so every photo looks like one set
Photos make or break a small business site, and the difference between a set that looks professional and one that doesn't is mostly consistency. Before you shoot, write a short brief: what's in frame, what light, which crops, and what stays the same in every picture. Then shoot to a list, not on impulse.
Why a brief beats better equipment
Most websites with weak photography don't suffer from low resolution. They suffer from mismatch: a bright flash photo next to a warm window-lit one, a wide shot of the shop beside a tight crop of a product on a different background, a team photo from a party next to a stiff headshot. Each image might be fine. Together they look collected rather than chosen, and the page loses the sense that one business with one point of view made it.
Art directors solve this with a brief written before anyone picks up a camera. For a small site, it fits on one page, and it is worth more than any of the other website photography tips here: with it, a phone camera is good enough for most needs.
The four lines of a photography brief
- Subject
- What the photos show, and what they never show. "Hands at work, finished pieces, the room. Never stock-style people pointing at screens." Decide whether people appear and how: candid, posed, faces or just hands.
- Light
- One kind of light for the whole set. Soft daylight from a side window suits food, craft and products; it's free and forgiving. Avoid the camera's flash and mixed light sources, which shift colour between shots.
- Crop and distance
- A few fixed framings: wide (the space), medium (a person or a table), close (a texture or detail). Decide the aspect ratios your site will use, often 4:3 or 3:2 for wide images and 4:5 or square for products, and compose with them in mind.
- What stays the same
- Background, surface, colour temperature, camera height and editing. A product range shot on the same board from the same angle looks like a catalogue; shot on whatever was nearby, it looks like a classified advert.
Plan a shot list by section
Work out where photos will go before you shoot, so you take what the page needs rather than what's easy. A typical small business site needs something like this:
| Section | What to shoot | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Hero | The single image that says what you do | Shoot wide with space on one side for text, plus a tighter version for phones |
| Services or products | Each item, same setup | Same background, angle and light for every item |
| About | The people, at work | Candid and in context beats a posed line-up |
| Place | The shopfront, the room, the view | Helps visitors recognise you when they arrive |
| Details | Textures, tools, ingredients | Useful as supporting images between sections |
Shooting with a phone
- Clean the lens. A fingerprint is the most common cause of hazy phone photos.
- Turn the flash off and shoot near a window, with the light coming from the side rather than behind you or behind the subject.
- Use the main lens. Digital zoom loses detail; step closer instead. The ultra-wide lens distorts faces and products near the edges.
- Switch on the grid and keep verticals straight, especially in rooms and shopfronts.
- Shoot both orientations of anything that might be a hero image. Phones crop wide images hard.
- Lock focus and exposure on the subject by holding a finger on it, so the camera doesn't brighten the background instead.
- Take more than you need. Twenty frames of a product make choosing the best one easy.
Editing for consistency
Edit the set together, not one photo at a time. Pick your best image, adjust its white balance, exposure and contrast, then copy those settings to the rest and fine-tune. Keep edits light: heavy filters date quickly and can misrepresent food or products, which customers notice when they arrive. Crop each image to one of your chosen ratios, then export at a sensible size, around 2,000 pixels on the long edge for full-width images, so pages stay quick.
People and permissions
Get permission from anyone recognisable before their photo goes online, and keep a note of it. Staff who leave may ask for photos to be removed. Photos of customers, children or patients need particular care. If you use other people's images, check the licence allows commercial use; free libraries differ on attribution and on use in logos or products.
Using your photos in Anticode
You can add photos and videos to an Anticode build. Each file is checked by its first bytes, to confirm it really is the image or video it claims to be, and stored under your account. The model sees the photos you add and can place them where they fit; videos are placed by name, and they play only inside app builds, so on design-engine pages link out to YouTube or Vimeo instead. Pages from the design engine can also draw on a curated photo library from Unsplash, which comes with written alt text, useful while you wait for your own shoot.
What Anticode can't do is take the photos, and it won't make a mismatched set look consistent. The brief above is still the most useful hour you'll spend on the site's look. When the photos are in, give each one accurate alt text; the guide on how to write alt text explains how.
Questions people ask
Can I use phone photos on my business website?
Yes. Recent phones are good enough for most small business sites if the light is good and the set is consistent. Hire a photographer for the hero image if budget allows.
What size should website photos be?
Around 2,000 pixels on the long edge for full-width images and smaller for thumbnails. Export them compressed; very large files slow pages without looking better.
Should I use stock photos?
Use them for texture or background, not to show your team, premises or work. Visitors can usually spot stock photos standing in for the real thing.