Photographs that earn their place

What a photograph is doing on the page

By the end of this you should be able to go down your own site and say, of every photograph on it, what that picture proves. The ones that prove nothing come off. That is the whole lesson, and it is worth more to a trade site than any amount of rewriting.

The problem a trade site has is that nobody can see the work. A kitchen fitter's last job is inside somebody else's house. A roofer's is twenty feet up. An electrician's is behind plasterboard. So a person reading at nine at night has two things to go on: what you say about yourself, which anybody could type, and what you show, which not everybody has.

That is why a stock photograph does more damage than a blank space. It is a picture of somebody else's work, chosen out of a library, and if it is the best thing on the page the reader draws the obvious conclusion. Half of them are lit like an advert anyway, in a country with different sockets, different roofs and a colour of sky we do not get.

One honest set from a job you did last month beats a gallery of forty perfect ones you did not.

Note. A picture that could sit on any site in your trade is not evidence of anything. It is wallpaper, and it is taking the space a real one would have had.

The same spot, before and after

The most persuasive thing you can put on a trade site costs about ninety seconds, spread across a job you were doing anyway. It is the same view, taken from the same place, before you start, part way through, and when you are finished.

The reason it works is that a doubtful reader does not admire a photograph. They compare. A finished shot on its own says the bathroom is nice, which they can see, and tells them nothing about who made it that way. The pair says you did. It is the only picture on a trade site that a sceptical person cannot argue with.

Same spot is the part people get wrong. If the after is taken from a different corner, in better light, from further back, the comparison collapses — the reader cannot line the two up and stops trying. Pick something to stand on and remember it: a floorboard, a manhole cover, the gatepost.

The middle picture is the one everybody skips and the one that does the most work. It is the part they are paying for and will never see again once it is covered — the battens and the felt, the wall before the plaster, the pipework under the boards. Nobody can check that later, which is exactly why a photograph of it is worth having.

1. Before you touch anything, stand where the whole job is in the frame and take the wide one.
2. Take a second, close up, of the actual fault or the actual state of it.
3. Part way through, from the same spot as the wide one, take the picture of whatever is about to be covered up.
4. When you have finished and tidied, stand in the same place again and take the last one.
5. Take one of the site left clean. Not for the set — for the person deciding whether to let a stranger into the house.

Tip. Do it on the first job of the week and you have one set. Do it for a month and you have four, which is four more than most sites in your trade have of their own work.

Note. Ask the customer first, and ask before you shoot rather than after — after is when people say no. Most say yes once they know the house will not be identifiable, so keep the door number, the street sign, the post on the worktop, the children and the number plate out of the frame.

Taking them on the phone already in your pocket

A phone from the last five years takes a better photograph than most of what is currently on trade websites. The camera is not what is holding your site back. Light, distance and holding still are, and all three are free.

None of this is a separate trip. It is three pauses of thirty seconds inside a day you were working anyway, which is the only reason it actually gets done.

• Wipe the lens on something clean first. Weeks in a pocket puts a smear on it, and that smear takes the sharpness off everything you shoot that day.
• Put the light behind you rather than behind the thing you are photographing. A window at the far end of a room turns everything in front of it into a silhouette.
• Outside, a flat grey day beats bright sun. Hard sun drops black shadow across half a roof and blows the rest out white.
• Walk closer instead of pinching to zoom, since a phone's zoom is only a crop, and hold still for a beat after you press it. Most blurred trade photographs are movement rather than focus.
• Landscape for the wide shots, because that is the shape of the picture across the top of a page. Portrait for the close details.
• Take six of each and delete five that evening. There is no going back next week once the wall is closed up.

What this needs

A phone

Anything from the last five years. Nobody looking at your site will know or care which.

A job you are already on

The set has to come off real work, so there is nothing to arrange and no day to set aside.

The customer's word

Ask before photographing inside somebody's home, and keep the house unidentifiable when you do.

Somewhere to put them

A folder on the phone for each job. Ten sets loose in a camera roll of four thousand pictures are ten sets you will never find again.

Note. Leave the pictures alone afterwards. Filters, heavy contrast and skies pushed to a colour they never were all read as staged, and staged is the one thing an honest set is trading on not being.

What is worth photographing on a job you are already doing

Not everything. Six pictures per job, taken in the order the work happens, and each one answering something a stranger would otherwise have to take on trust.

Note. Caption each set in one line: the work, the material, the town, how long it took. A reclaimed slate re-roof on a Victorian terrace in Chorlton, four days. The town helps people nearby find you, the material speaks to somebody who has been quoted for the same thing elsewhere, and the timescale answers the question everybody is too polite to ask.

What never to put on it

Some pictures are not merely weak. They actively cost you the reader, and two of them can cost you more than that.

• Stock photographs of other people at work. The people in them are models, the tools are props, and a tradesperson can tell in about a second. So can a customer who has seen the same picture on two other sites in the same town.
• Anything taken off a competitor's site or out of an image search. It is somebody else's copyright and somebody else's work, and in a trade where the firms all know each other it gets noticed by exactly the person you took it from.
• A job you did not do. It happens more than anyone admits — a friend's work, a photograph from a course, something from a previous employer. One customer standing in front of it asking a question about it and the conversation is over.
• A manufacturer's press shot of the boiler, the tile or the paint. That is a picture of a product. It proves the product exists, which was never in doubt.
• Anything carrying a customer's door number, street name, post on the worktop or their children. You did not get permission for that, and you would not want it taken of your own house.
• Screenshots of five-star reviews used in place of photographs. A review is proof and it is worth having, but it is words. Put the words on the page where they can be read.

Note. There is one honest exception. A photograph of a material, a tool or a certificate is not a claim about a job you did, so a picture of the actual slate you fit or the actual card in your wallet is fine wherever it helps. The line is whether the picture says this is my work.

What the builder does with the ones you upload

Attach them with the plus button in the message box, four to a message, on any turn rather than only the first. Say where each belongs in the same sentence — the wide shot at the top, the pair under bathroom refits — because the picture and the instruction arriving together is what stops it guessing.

• It does not edit the photograph. Ask for it cropped tighter, darkened, made smaller or moved and that is done with code on the page; the file you sent is left exactly as it was.
• It does not quietly use a different picture from the one you meant. If it cannot tell which you are pointing at, it is told to name the candidates and ask, because being handed the wrong one without being told looks identical to the file being broken.
• It does not invent a picture address from somewhere else on the internet, and it does not stand a grey box or an emoji in for a photograph that was asked for.
• It does not overwrite. The same filename attached twice is saved twice, and taking a picture off a page is a different job from deleting the file — so say which one you want.

What happens to a photograph you attach

Per message

Four, on any turn

Before it leaves your machine

Shrunk to 1400 pixels on the longest edge, which is more than a full-width picture on a good screen needs

Formats

A PNG whose file is under about 400KB keeps its transparent background. Everything else is re-encoded as a JPEG, and an animated GIF arrives as one still frame.

Where it ends up

Inside the site's own files rather than on a photo host, so it survives the download and the live address with no link that can expire

What is written alongside it

One line saying what the picture shows, made by looking at it, which is what lets you say the van photo three turns later

Tip. An SVG is the one it cannot look at. It is saved, it works, and it is the right format for a logo — but it is never shown to the part that reads pictures, so the only description that file will ever carry is its own name. Rename it to something that says what it is before you attach it.

Note. The photographs it commissions for a first draft never contain a person. No faces, no hands, not even a reflection in a window or a shadow on a wall, because image models still put six fingers on a hand and a trade site is mostly hands doing work. So the only way a face gets onto your site is if you take it. That is the single strongest picture most trade sites are missing, and nothing here will make it for you.

How to tell whether they are earning their place

One question per picture, asked out loud: what does this prove. If the honest answer is that it looks nice, it is decoration, and decoration is what the design is for.

The second test takes ten seconds. Cover the logo with your thumb. If every photograph on the page could belong to any firm in the trade, the pictures are not doing the job the words cannot do, and the site is running on words alone.

1. Open your site on a phone and go down it slowly, the way somebody who has never heard of you would.
2. At each photograph, say what it proves. Mark the ones where the answer takes more than a sentence.
3. Count how many are your own work. If the answer is none, that is the whole job for this week and nothing else on the site matters as much.
4. Look for the pair. One before and after, from the same spot, somewhere near the top rather than buried in a gallery at the bottom.
5. Take the marked ones off. Four real photographs read better than four real ones and eleven filling space.

Note. Six to twelve of your own, placed where each answers something, does more than sixty in a gallery. A long gallery is not read; it is scrolled past. The three at the top are the only ones most people ever look at, so those three should be the pair and the face.

Common questions

How many photographs does a site actually need?

Six to twelve of your own work, each placed where it answers something. One before-and-after pair from the same spot, near the top, is worth more than the rest of them put together.

My work is inside people's houses. Can I photograph it at all?

Ask, and almost everyone says yes. Keep the house unidentifiable — no door number, no street sign, no post on the worktop, no children, no number plate — and say that when you ask. Photograph the work rather than the home and there is rarely a problem.

Can I mix my own photographs with the ones the builder made?

Yes, and most good sites do. The commissioned ones carry no people, no writing and no numbers, so they are doing atmosphere and texture. Anything that has to work as proof needs to be yours.

Should I pay a photographer instead?

Once, perhaps, for a decent picture of you and the van, since that one is hard to take of yourself. A day's shoot cannot cover the work, though, because the work happens on Tuesdays in other people's houses. The phone set from every job is what keeps the site current.