Local Shop Host
Business photos with your phone: 8 tips that make all the difference
You don't need a photographer to get good photos of your business. Light, angles, tidying up, the rule of thirds: eight simple tips for an ordinary phone.
Photos are often the first thing a customer looks at, on your Google profile and on your website. A dark, crooked photo makes a business look neglected, even when yours is spotless.
Good news: the phone in your pocket is more than enough. What makes the difference isn't the camera, it's how you use it.
1. Clean the lens
It sounds silly, but it's the number one cause of blurry or hazy photos. A phone lens spends its day in pockets and under fingers. Give it a wipe with a soft cloth (or a clean T-shirt) before every shoot.
2. Look for daylight
Natural light, near a window or outside on an overcast day, almost always beats ceiling fluorescents. Avoid harsh midday sun, which creates hard shadows, and turn off the flash.
For your storefront, shoot it when the sun is on it, not when it's behind the building.
3. Tidy up the frame
Before you take the shot, look at the screen the way a customer would: a garbage bag, a dangling cable, a stack of boxes, a cluttered counter? Move them. Two minutes of tidying beats any filter.
4. Don't zoom, step closer
On most phones, zooming degrades the image. Walk closer to your subject instead. If your phone has several lenses ("0.5×", "1×", "2×"), those are real lenses and are fine to use.
5. Hold your phone horizontally
On a website, most large images (the top of your home page, for instance) are wider than they are tall. A vertical photo gets cropped there, often in the wrong place. Save vertical shots for social media.
6. Use the rule of thirds
Turn on the grid in your phone's camera settings. Put your main subject on one of the lines, or where two lines cross, instead of dead center. That's the rule of thirds, and it's the easiest way to make a photo look "pro".
The grid also helps keep lines straight: a tilted door frame stands out immediately.
7. Show people (with their permission)
A photo of your hands at work, your team behind the counter or a happy customer tells more than an empty shelf. Always ask before posting a photo of someone, and avoid photographing children without their parents' consent.
8. Take lots of shots
Take ten photos of each thing, from two or three angles. Pick the best one later, with a fresh eye. That's exactly what professional photographers do.
What next?
Put your best photos on your Google Business Profile and on your website. No need to edit or resize them yourself: on our turnkey websites, every photo is straightened, compressed and sized for the visitor's screen automatically, so the site stays fast on a phone.
It isn't the camera that makes the photo. It's the light and the tidying up.
Your turn
Which photo of your business would you redo first: the storefront, the inside or your products? Pick one, and reshoot it this week with these eight tips.