Use real photos, not stock. Your phone is fine for job photos and anything that changes often; a professional is worth paying for the handful of images that carry the most weight, like the homepage banner, team shots, premises, products and food. Stock is only safe for backgrounds and topic images that aren’t meant to represent you.
We have photographers in-house, so we’ll admit a bias up front: we think photos do more for a small business website than almost anything else on the page, and stock photos usually do more harm than good. That doesn’t mean every business needs a professional shoot. It means every business needs real photos, and the question is how to get them.
Why stock photos backfire for local businesses
Stock photos are great at one thing: looking generic. That’s what they’re made for. They have to work for a thousand different buyers, so they show nobody in particular doing nothing in particular.
On a local business site, that’s a problem. Customers are trying to work out who you are and whether to trust you. A smiling model in a hard hat, or a team of strangers around a laptop, tells them you didn’t have a photo of your own. Many visitors will recognise the image from somewhere else.
Free stock libraries are tempting, and legally many of them are fine. The Unsplash licence, for example, allows commercial use without attribution. The legal question isn’t usually the issue. The trust question is.
There are a few places where stock is reasonable: abstract background textures, a generic image for a blog post about a topic rather than your business, or a placeholder while you organise real photos. Avoid it for anything that’s meant to represent you, your team, your premises or your work.
The three options compared
| Stock | Your phone | Professional | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free to modest | Free | A few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars (ours start from $495 + GST for a 2-hour shoot) |
| Shows your actual business | No | Yes | Yes |
| Quality ceiling | High, but generic | Decent with care | High and consistent |
| Best for | Backgrounds, blog topics | Job photos, ongoing updates, social | Homepage, team, premises, products, food |
| Main risk | Looks like everyone else | Inconsistent, poor light | Cost, and photos ageing as things change |
For most small businesses the right answer is a mix: a professional shoot for the handful of photos that carry the most weight, and phone photos for everything that changes often.
Taking decent phone photos
Modern phones are capable cameras. What lets most phone photos down isn’t the phone, it’s light, angle and clutter. These habits make the biggest difference.
Before you shoot
- Wipe the lens. It lives in your pocket. A smudged lens gives that hazy, soft look.
- Turn on the grid in your camera settings. It helps you keep horizons and walls straight.
- Clear the clutter. Move the wheelie bin, the hose, the coffee cups and the ute with the ladder rack (unless the ute is the point).
Light
- Shoot in soft light. Overcast days are a gift. Early morning and late afternoon are better than midday, when Northern Rivers sun gives harsh shadows and squinting faces.
- Put the light behind you or to the side, not behind your subject. A person standing in front of a bright window becomes a silhouette.
- Indoors, turn off overhead lights and use window light if you can. Mixed light sources give odd colour casts.
- Tap to focus, then slide your finger to adjust brightness before you take the shot.
Framing
- Use the main camera, not digital zoom. Walk closer instead. On phones with several lenses, the main (1x) lens is usually the best quality.
- Shoot landscape for website banners. Most header images are wide. Shoot vertical as well if you’ll use them on Instagram or stories.
- Leave space around the subject. Websites crop images differently on desktop and phone, so give the designer room to work with.
- Get down to the level of the work. A deck shot from standing height looks ordinary. The same deck shot from knee height looks considered.
People
- Use portrait mode for headshots, with plenty of space between the person and the background.
- Take a lot of frames. People blink. Twenty shots to get one good one is normal.
- Show people working, not just posing. Hands on tools, a practitioner talking with a client (with permission), a chef plating up.
Tradies get the most mileage out of job photos. Our guide to before-and-after photos for tradies covers matching angles so the comparison works.
A shot list to start with
Whichever route you take, aim to have these:
- You (and your team), individually and together, looking approachable.
- You at work, doing the main thing customers pay for.
- Your premises: shopfront, signage, reception or workspace.
- Finished work, or your product, at its best.
- Details that show quality: joinery, finishes, plating, packaging.
- Your vehicle or kit, if it’s branded and tidy.
- Something local that places you: the main street, the river, the view from your site.
These same photos are useful on your Google Business Profile, which has its own photo guidelines, including that photos should be in focus, well lit and free of significant alterations or heavy use of filters or AI.
When it’s worth booking a photographer
Phone photos are fine for job galleries and social. A professional is worth it when:
- The photo sells the thing directly. Food, accommodation, retail products, venues. If customers are choosing on looks, the photos are the product.
- It’s the first impression. The homepage banner and team photos set the tone for the whole site.
- You need consistency. A matched set of team headshots, all in the same light and style, looks far more professional than ten different selfies.
- The space is hard to shoot. Interiors, dim restaurants and large sites need lighting and lenses a phone can’t match.
- You’re rebranding or launching a new site. Getting photos done at the same time means the design is built around real images rather than placeholders.
For Saltbush Bar & Grill, a hospitality site where the food and the room do the selling, professional photography made sense. For a plumber’s job gallery, a careful phone and good habits will do the job.
Getting photos onto your site properly
Resize photos before uploading (around 1,600 to 2,000 pixels on the long edge is plenty for most uses) so they don’t slow the site down. Give each one a descriptive file name and alt text that says what’s in the image, which helps both search engines and people using screen readers. We cover alt text in our website accessibility basics.
Start with the shot list this week, using your phone, and swap out any stock image that’s pretending to be you. For the handful of photos that carry the most weight (headshots, venues, products, food), our commercial photography can be planned alongside a new website so the shots fit the layouts they’re going into.