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.
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.
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.