Most small business websites we’re asked to redesign have the same photo problem. There are forty decent images, and they look like they came from forty different businesses: a moody stock shot on the homepage, a bright phone photo on the services page, a team photo taken under fluorescent lights at the Christmas party.
None of those photos is bad on its own. Together they make the business look improvised. Photography works as part of your brand when you write down a short photo style, plan each shoot around where the images will be used, and then use that one consistent set everywhere. It’s one of the cheapest ways to look established, and it usually matters more than whether the logo is perfect.
What a photo style is
People hear “photo style” and think of Instagram filters. A filter is the least of it. A style is a handful of decisions you make once and then repeat:
- Light. Natural window light, bright and airy, or something more contrasty and dramatic. Pick one.
- Colour. Warm or cool whites, and whether your brand colours show up in the frame (a uniform, a wall, a van).
- People. Posed and looking at the camera, or caught mid-task. Real staff or nobody.
- Framing. Close details, wide environments, or a mix with a known ratio.
- Setting. Your actual workplace, your clients’ homes, the local landscape, or a plain backdrop.
Write those down in plain language. Five lines is enough. For two very different businesses, it might read like this.
A physio clinic: “Daylight from the side, never flash. Warm whites. Practitioners working with clients, hands and faces, rarely looking at the camera. Clean treatment rooms with nothing clinical in the foreground. Leave space on one side of wide shots for text.”
A concrete contractor: “Early morning or late afternoon light on site. Crew in branded shirts, mid-pour or mid-grind. Close-ups of the finished surface. At least one wide shot per job that shows the house or slab in context. No posed thumbs up.”
That second line about thumbs up isn’t a joke. Once it’s written down, nobody has to argue about it again.
Planning a brand shoot
A brand shoot that goes well is about 80% planning. The photographer can only shoot what’s in front of them, and on the day you’ll forget half of what you need.
Start with where the images will go, not with what looks nice. Every placement has a shape:
| Where it’s used | Shape to shoot | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Website hero banner | Wide landscape | Space on one side for a headline; subject not dead centre |
| Website service pages | Landscape or square | One image per service, so list your services first |
| Instagram and Facebook feed | Portrait (4:5) | Shoot some vertical, don’t rely on cropping a wide shot |
| Stories and Reels covers | Tall vertical (9:16) | Keep faces in the middle third |
| Team page and Google Business Profile | Head and shoulders | Same background, same light, same distance for everyone |
| Brochures, signage, reports | Anything, but high resolution | Needs enough pixels for print at full size |
If you’ve never thought about which photos you need, our guide to stock, professional or phone photos for your website covers where each one fits.
Before the day
- Clean the vans, tidy the workshop or clinic, and clear benches of personal clutter. It takes longer than you’d think.
- Sort out uniforms. Everyone in the same shirt colour, ironed, no competitor brands on caps.
- Get written permission from anyone who appears, especially customers. A simple model release covers it.
- Pick the time around the light. On the North Coast, midday summer sun is harsh and flat. Early morning is kinder to faces and less sweaty for your team.
- Book the right people. If the shoot is about your senior electrician’s work, check he’s rostered on.
A half-day shot list that works
This is roughly the order we’d run a half-day brand shoot for a service business:
- Headshots first, while everyone is fresh and the shirts are clean.
- A group shot of the team, plus two or three smaller groupings.
- Work in progress: three to five tasks that represent your main services.
- Details: tools, hands, materials, finishes, the product up close.
- Environment: the front of the premises, signage, the van on a recognisable local street.
- Customer interactions, staged with willing customers or staff playing the part.
- A few spare frames of empty spaces and textures, which designers love for backgrounds.
Leave twenty minutes free at the end. Something always comes up that you didn’t plan for, and it’s often the best image of the day.
After the shoot
You’ll get more images back than you can use. Choose a smaller set that tells the story and archive the rest somewhere you can find it.
Ask for files in at least two versions: full resolution for print, and web-sized copies. Rename the web files to describe what’s in them before they go on the site. Google’s own image SEO guidance recommends short, descriptive file names and useful alt text, and it’s easy to do while you still remember who’s in each photo.
Keep the full-resolution originals for print work. A photo that looks fine on a phone can fall apart on an A1 banner, and colour shifts between screen and paper are normal. That’s covered in why your logo looks wrong on the flyer, and the same applies to photos.
Using one set of images everywhere
The point of a brand shoot is that the same look shows up wherever customers see you. In practice:
Your website gets the strongest images in the most visible spots: hero banner, service pages, about page. Don’t bury the best photo on page four.
Your Google Business Profile gets real photos of the team, premises and work. People scroll these on their phones before they call, and fresh photos are part of keeping a profile active for local search.
Your social posts get a slow drip. A half-day shoot can supply months of content if you pair the images with consistent social templates that keep your brand recognisable, mixed in with fresh day-to-day photos.
Your print gets the high-resolution versions, chosen by whoever lays out the brochure or sign.
Filling the gaps with your phone
You won’t book a photographer for every new job, and you shouldn’t need to. Use your written style to shoot phone photos that sit alongside the professional ones. Same time of day, same framing rules, same “no thumbs up”. Clean the lens on your shirt first. That alone fixes a surprising number of hazy photos.
When the team changes, the premises change or the photos start looking dated, reshoot. For most businesses that’s every year or two.
Where to start
Write your five-line style this week, even if a shoot is months away. Then list every place an image needs to go and mark which ones you already have. The gaps are your shot list.
Our commercial photography shoots start from that same shot list, so every frame has somewhere to go (at the time of writing, from $495 + GST for a two-hour shoot), and they slot straight into our branding and design projects.