The photos on a tradesperson’s site do a job no sentence can: they let a customer see the finish before they hand over the keys. And the gap between a good phone photo and a bad one is not the camera, it is the two minutes of thought around it. The best time to photograph a job is on the job, with the light you have, and the habits below cost nothing but attention. Everything here can be done with the phone already in your pocket.
Light beats equipment
Every good job photo has one thing in common: daylight doing the work. Phone cameras drown in dim, mixed indoor lighting, and no filter rescues a yellow-lit ceiling shot. The habits that matter:
Shoot during the day with the room lights off where you can. Mixed colour temperatures, daylight in the window, orange bulbs on the ceiling, are what make interiors look amateur.
Face the window with your subject; shooting towards a window turns the room into a silhouette.
Wipe the lens. It sounds like a joke until you count the photos that were one pocket-lint away from being usable.
Avoid the flash. It flattens texture and bounces hard off gloss paint and tiles. If a space is genuinely too dark, a steady hand and the phone’s night mode beat the flash every time.
The angles that sell the work
Customers want to see the finish and imagine it in their own home. That translates into three shots per job, taken before you pack up:
The wide shot from the doorway, at chest height, showing the whole finished space. Straight verticals matter: hold the phone level, or lines lean and rooms look wonky. The detail shots, two or three of the bits you are proud of: the tile alignment, the pipework boxed in neatly, the panel gap. Details are what separate a tradesperson from a handyman in a customer’s mind. The in-progress shot, which most people skip and should not: it proves the work is yours and shows the care that went in under the surface.
Two things to cut from the frame before pressing the shutter: clutter (mugs, tools, packaging) and your van’s reflection in the new glass. Ten seconds of tidying is the cheapest photo edit there is.
Before and after: the sequence that actually persuades
The before and after pair is the strongest sales image a trade business can own, and the difference between a convincing one and a weak one is planning. Take the “before” before you start, from the spot where the “after” will be taken, at a similar height. The pair reads instantly when the camera position matches, and never quite lands when it does not.
| Shot | When | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Before | Before anything moves, same angle as the after | The pair persuades, a lone after just decorates |
| Middle | At the messiest or most technical point | Shows the work under the surface |
| After | Last thing, daylight, tidy space | The shot that closes the job |
Collect the sequence on every job, even the small ones. A year in, you have a portfolio that sells while you are on the next job, and every photo cost you thirty seconds you were already spending on site.
What to leave out
A few rules keep the portfolio on the right side of useful:
No customer’s documents, family photos or house numbers in frame; blur or reframe if they are. Privacy problems from a portfolio photo are rare but memorable, and none of them are good.
No other firms’ work in shot without saying so. Passing off a supplier’s fitted kitchen as your portfolio is the kind of thing that gets found out.
Avoid heavy filters and HDR effects: they read as hiding something. A phone’s auto mode with the exposure nudged down slightly is more believable than any preset.
Skip the watermark. Nobody has ever hired anyone because of a watermark, and the corner signature makes images harder to reuse in quotes and directories.
Getting them onto the site
Photos straight off a phone are enormous files, several megabytes each, and a page of unedited uploads is the slowest kind of site. Two minutes of handling fixes it: crop to the subject, let the phone’s editor resize or “export small”, and aim for images in the low hundreds of kilobytes. If your site builder handles conversion for you, even better, but check the finished page loads fast on mobile data, because that is where customers will look.
Name the files for what they show, bathroom-refit-leeds rather than IMG_4821, and they will do quiet work in image search and in your own media library for years.
A customer cannot judge your pipework, but they can judge a photo. Two wide shots, two details, one before and after, taken in daylight on every job: that is a portfolio that closes work while you sleep.
The habit that makes it work
The mechanics are the easy half. The hard half is remembering, mid-job, with the van loaded and the next appointment looming. Tape the habit to something you touch every day: the last job on the checklist is “photos before pack up”. The tradespeople whose sites look busy and current are not better photographers, they just never left the job without them.
Start with the next job on the diary. One pair, one detail, daylight, tidy frame. The portfolio builds itself from there.