You know the ones. The smiling contractor with impossibly clean hands. The team of diverse professionals high-fiving in a glass office. The generic house that isn't in Kentucky.
Everybody recognizes stock photography, and the moment somebody recognizes it on your website, something quiet happens: they stop fully believing the rest of the page. If the photo is fake, is the review real? Is that actually your work?
Your worst real photo beats the best stock photo
This is genuinely true and it's the easiest advantage a local business has. A slightly crooked phone photo of an actual roof you actually put on an actual house in Clark County does more work than a professional photo of somebody else's.
When stock is actually fine
I'm not absolutist about this. Stock imagery is fine for things that aren't claims about you: a background texture, a map, an illustration, an icon. Nobody feels lied to by a pattern.
It's fatal in exactly three places, because in all three the picture is making a promise: your team, your work, and your premises. A stock photo of a crew is a photo of people who have never worked for you, on a job you didn't do, and if a customer clocks that — and in a county this size somebody will — every other claim on the page gets quietly downgraded.
The twenty-minute shot list
Next time you're on a job, take these. Phone is fine. Daylight is free.
- The finished work, straight on, whole thing in frame.
- A close-up detail — the part you're proud of that a customer would never notice.
- Before and after of the same thing, from the same spot. This one sells by itself.
- Your truck or your storefront, because people want to know you're real.
- You. Actually you, not a stock person. People hire people.
One tip that makes phone photos look twice as good: take them in the hour after sunrise or before sunset, and stand so the sun is behind you. That's most of what professional photographers are doing that you aren't.
Five phone-camera things that matter more than the camera
- Wipe the lens. It lives in your pocket. This one fixes more bad photos than anything else on the list.
- Walk closer instead of zooming. Phone zoom throws away detail; your feet don't.
- Shoot it twice — once wide, once portrait. Wide for the banner across the top of a page, tall for phones and for your Google listing. Same job, two shapes, ten extra seconds.
- Get the whole thing in frame once before you start taking detail shots. It's the photo you'll wish you had, and you can't go back after the scaffolding comes down.
- Ask first if it's somebody's house. Most people say yes and are pleased to be asked. A photo you have to pull down later is worse than one you never took.
What if you genuinely have no photos yet
Then I start with what exists — your storefront, your truck, your tools, you — and the site gets built to hold a gallery that's easy to add to. I'd rather launch with six honest photos and grow it than fill the space with strangers and never go back.
And when you do take them, send them to me twice: once for the website and once for your Google Business Profile. Photos on the listing are doing work for you in the map results, where a lot of local searching actually ends, and it's the same twenty minutes of shooting either way.
Send me a folder of those and I can build you a website that looks like nobody else's, because it's full of things nobody else has.