Website photography can be a make-or-break element of your website’s tone and style, ensuring your company appears professional, relatable, trustworthy, and above all, genuine - bye, bye stock photos of cheesy grins and handshakes!
But it’s often a task we all shy away from - after all we’re not pro photographers! But you don’t need to be! 2020 is fast-becoming the year that shows that as marketers, and professionals we all have to be adaptable and have multiple skills to reflect the changing times. So if you need fresh site photography fast, or you’re working with a low budget, so a pro photographer isn’t an option, start with the following advice:
There are three areas of your site that are absolutely critical in regards to having photography:
- Team/About
- Products/Store
- Blog/Resources
If needs be, the rest of your site can be text-only, and that is a popular design style at the moment, so you’d get away with a minimal image-free design elsewhere.
With that in mind, here’s our advice for these core areas:
Team/About
As a novice photographer ensure you have a consistent setup, don’t start with props and other complications - just keep it simple, a clean background and identical posing style for all of your team. Take the photos all in portrait rather than recommended, and make sure you make the most of the ’rule of thirds’.
The iPhone allows you to take photos in Portrait Mode, meaning you can blur backgrounds and ‘get clever’ with your shots, so feel free to explore this option, but make sure everyone’s photo uses the same settings, to avoid confusion and conflict when they’re displayed on your website.
You can also use the iPhone’s editing capabilities, to overhaul the final appearance of your photos, including greyscaling your photos using - my preferred - Noir setting, amongst others.
Level up: You can boost your website by applying the rule of thirds and the iPhone’s high-quality camera to take other more off-the-cuff shots of your team to include sparingly across your Homepage, Services pages and Contact page. Consult another creative member of your team for their insights to ensure you don’t end up too ‘snap happy’!
Products/Store
If you’re an e-commerce retailer then undoubtedly the importance of photography is vital to ensure you can sell your products. Take these photos using the basic settings of your iPhone, but remember for successfully photography products you’re going to probably need a little extra kit.
We recommend a tripod and lighting box, both of which can be bought on Amazon for just over £20 in total (but will be available widely via other reputable retailers!).
Using these two additional pieces of equipment will allow you to brighten your final photos and steady your pose, allowing you to create a consistent catalogue of product photography.
Blog/Resources
This is the one area that you can get away without using genuine photography!
Use high quality free stock photography from sites like Pexels, Pixabay and Burst by Shopify, to create eye-catching visuals for Blog content. Ensure you choose relevant pictures - a blog post on Facebook should include a picture of someone navigating around Facebook, Facebook open in an internet window, or someone on an iPad/iPhone, would all work!
For your Resources, you can use stock photography for the covers, or you could just create text-only covers. Explore other websites for an idea on how they include visuals in their resource libraries - it may be that your industry tends to display content in a certain way, but you should also factor in how your resource library works for functionality purposes.
Please note: This article is written using the photography tools available on an iPhone 11, but should also be accurate for those using other later iPhone models, i.e. iPhone SE, iPhone XS, iPhone 8Plus and iPhone 7Plus.
