We’ve worked with trades businesses for over 15 years, and here’s what we see on most websites: terrible photos. Dark shots, blurry close-ups, thumbs blocking the lens. 

Your work is solid. You can gut and rebuild a bathroom, rewire an entire house, or get someone’s heating back up in an emergency. But when your photos look like you took them with a potato in the dark, chances are customers won’t trust you with their home. 

The good news is that you don’t need to hire a photographer or buy expensive camera equipment. Your phone and some basic know-how will get you photos that actually show off your skills. 

This guide shows you how to take photos for your trade website that showcase the professional you really are.

Essential Equipment for Trade Photography

📱 Smarphone vs. Professional Camera

The camera in your pocket will do the job. Modern phones have better cameras than expensive equipment from five years go. 

Your iPhone or Android handles different lighting, edits photos on the spot, and takes sharp professional shots. For trade work – completed jobs, before-and-after shots, team photos – your phone does everything you need. 

Sure, a fancy DSLR might take slightly better photos in perfect conditions. It also costs a grand, needs constant adjustments, and means carrying extra gear to every job. Unless photography is your side business, use what you’ve got.

💰 Must-Have Accessories on a Budget

Your phone will do most of the work, but a few affordable accessories can dramatically improve your trade website photos without breaking the bank:

• Lens cleaning kit – A dirty lens ruins every photo. Keep microfibre cloths handy for sharp, clear shots.
• Grippy phone case – Most blurry photos happen from camera shake when you’re stretching into tight spots. A proper grip fixes this instantly. 

💡 Lighting Equipment

Good lighting turns amateur snaps into professional photos. No studio gear needed. 

A simple LED panel gives consistent light for indoor shots. Get one where you can adjust the colour temperature – match the lighting whether you’re in a warm living room or cool bathroom. 

For tight spaces, those little LED ring lights that clip onto your phone work perfectly. Great for detail shots of wiring or pipe connections where normal light can’t reach. 

Reflectors bounce light into dark corners without needing power. Get a foldable set for £20. They pack small enough for your tool bag.

📸 Tripods & Stabilisers

A basic phone tripod is your best investment. Sharp photos every time, especially in poor light. Essential for consistent before-and-after shots. 

Get one with flexible legs that wrap around pipes or radiators – regular tripods are useless in most workspaces. Some have magnetic feet for sticking to boiler cases or electrical panels. 

Start simple. Get comfortable with your phone and maybe one piece of extra kit before you start going crazy on gadgets.

Types of Photography Every Trade Website Needs

↔️ Before and After Project Photos

Don’t pretty up the “before” photo – show the real problem. That wrecked bathroom, mess of dodgy wiring, or ancient boiler ready for the tip. Customers want to see you handle proper jobs, not just polish perfect installations. 

Your “after” shot shows the transformation. Use the same angle and similar lighting, but make your finished work look sharp. Clean installation, proper finish, attention to detail – make it obvious. 

Side-by-side comparisons work brilliantly for social media and create instant impact.

🧑🏻‍🔧 Team Photos

People hire people, not companies. Good team photos help customers feel comfortable about who’s coming to their home. 

• Keep it consistent – same background, similar lighting, everyone in clean work gear. Find a plain wall with good natural light. Aim for friendly and professional, not stiff corporate shots that make you look like estate agents. 
• Include anyone customers might meet – you, regular team members, office staff who answer the phones.
• Mix in action shots of your team actually working. Photos of installing, fixing, explaining problems to customers add credibility and show real expertise.

🛠️ Equipment & Tool Showcase

Good tools mean good work, and customers know it. Professional equipment tells people that you’re serious about your trade and invest in doing things right. 

Photograph your best kit in decent light with clean backgrounds. New diagnostic equipment, specialist tools, van loaded with quality gear – show it off. Works especially well for emergency call-outs when customers need to know you’ll arrive with the right equipment. 

Van shots work brilliantly. Well-organised vehicle with proper branding and quality tools suggests you know your stuff. Perfect for social media and Local SEO. High-quality photos like these also perform exceptionally well in trades PPC campaigns, where professional imagery can significantly improve click-through and conversion rates.

🎪 Behind-the-Scenes Work Process

Process photos build trust by showing your professional approach. Whether you’re a heating engineer installing a heat pump, an electrician following safety protocols, or a builder keeping sites tidy, they demonstrate your methods, safety standards, and respect for customers’ homes.

• Capture key stages – planning, protecting property, methodical installation, cleaning up. Shows you’re technically skilled and respectful of people’s homes. 
• Safety gear in action reassures customers. Team wearing proper PPE, following procedures, keeping areas tidy – proves your professionalism. 

Perfect content for social media and blog posts. Gives insight into how you work and positions you as the careful, professional choice.

Photography Techniques for Different Trade Scenarios

💡 Indoor Work: Sorting Out the Lighting

Indoor photos kill most trade websites, but nail the lighting and you’ll stand out a mile. The problem is usually rubbish lighting that makes your brilliant work look amateur. 

• Start with natural light. Open blinds and curtains – window light is soft and shows colour properly. Don’t rely on ceiling lights. They create harsh shadows and weird colour casts that make everything look cheap.
• Add extra light when needed. LED panels or ring lights work when natural light isn’t enough. Bounce light off white walls or use reflectors to soften it. Fill shadows without creating an overlit, artificial look.
• Watch for colour problems. Mixed bulb types create yellow or blue colour casts – old incandescent bulbs with cooler LED lighting is the worst offender. Use your phone’s white balance settings or fix colours in editing. For electrical work, turn off room lights to avoid glare on metal components.

⛅️ Outdoor Projects: Weather & Timing

• Cloudy days are perfect. Clouds work like a giant light diffuser, giving even lighting without harsh shadows. Don’t wait for sunshine – bright sun creates too much contrast for phone cameras.
• Work around bright sun carefully. Avoid midday when shadows are shortest and harshest. Shoot early morning or late afternoon when light is warmer and flattering. Use your phone’s HDR mode to capture details in bright and dark areas.
• Use weather to your advantage. Rain creates dramatic before-and-after shots. Keep your phone dry and safe. Wind makes staying steady harder – use a tripod or brace against something solid.

🛁 Small Spaces: Bathrooms & Kitchens

Tight spaces, shiny surfaces, and mixed lighting make bathrooms and kitchens tough to photograph. They’re also where the most impressive transformations take place. 

• Use wide angle mode to capture more space. Shoot bathrooms from the doorway to get the whole room, then get closer for detail shots – tiling, socket placement, pipe connections.
• Handle reflections smart. Position yourself at angles to minimise mirror and tile reflections. Use reflections cleverly to show more of your work. Sometimes mirror reflections help capture angles you couldn’t shoot directly.
• Deal with common problems. Steam and water spots ruin photos instantly. Wait for surfaces to clear after hot water work. Wipe down shower screens and mirrors before shooting.

🏚️ Large Projects: Showing the Full Picture

Big installations – major home improvements, full reroofs, or complete garden makeovers – need photos that show both scale and quality.

• Start with wide shots. Step back and capture the full project area. Get high up if you can safely to show scope. Help customers understand how much work you’ve done.
• Then focus on details. Properly secured pipes, clean connections, neat cable runs – these details prove professional execution. Show craftsmanship even when customers don’t understand the technical side.
• Tell the project story. Create photo sequences: pre-work, key work stages, completed job (before and afters). Works brilliantly for website galleries and social media. For complex installations, consider adding annotations highlighting key components and improvements. These educational shots position you as the expert.

Technical Photography Tips for Trades

📷 Composition Rules

Good composition transforms snapshots into professional-looking photos that actually sell your services. 

• Don’t centre everything. Imagine your screen divided into 9 sections. Place important elements – new boiler, tiled shower, installed heat pump – along these lines or where they meet. This creates more interesting photos than sticking everything dead centre.
• Use lines to guide the eye. Lead viewers to your work using natural lines. Pipe runs, cable trays, or lines of newly installed flooring work like visual arrows pointing to what you want people to notice.
• Fill the frame with what matters. Get close enough so your work dominates the shot. Empty space around your subject weakens impact and makes it harder for viewers to appreciate your work.
• Clean backgrounds make professional photos. Move tools, packaging, and clutter out of the shot. Change your angle to avoid distracting elements. A stunning bathroom installation loses impact with a pile of boxes in the corner. 

👌 Getting Sharp, Clear Images

Blurry photos kill credibility faster than cowboys ruin kitchen tiles. Sharp images are achievable with basic technique and your smartphone.

• Hold your phone properly. Use both hands, not one. Brace yourself against walls or solid surfaces when possible. Most blur happens from stretching into awkward positions one-handed.
• Focus deliberately. Tap to focus on your phone screen before each photo. Don’t let autofocus guess what’s important. For installation photos, focus on the key component or connection point.
• Use burst mode for moving subjects or when you can’t hold perfectly still. Take 5-10 shots quickly, choose the sharpest one later. Particularly useful for detail shots where tiny movements create noticeable blur. Better to have options than one blurry photo.
• Keep your lens obsessively clean. Pocket fluff, fingerprints and dust create soft, hazy images that look unprofessional. A quick wipe with a microfibre cloth makes an immediate difference.

🌈 Colour Balance for Different Work Environments

Colour accuracy matters more than you think. Customers need to see materials, finishes, and installations in true colours to make informed decisions.

• Different lights create different problems. Old incandescent bulbs make everything warm and yellow. Fluorescent lights add green tint. Some LED fixtures create cold blue cast. Your phone tries to compensate automatically but doesn’t always get it right – often making it worse.
• Use manual white balance settings when automatic isn’t working. Most phones have presets like “tungsten”, “fluorescent”, or “daylight”. Match the setting to whatever light you have most of.
• Mixed lighting creates the biggest headaches. Natural light through windows mixed with artificial room lighting makes colours look completely wrong. Either use additional lighting to overpower one source, or position yourself to use primarily one type of lighting.
• For accurate colours – showing tile colours or paint finishes – include something white in your shot. Gives you a reference point for correcting colours when editing. Piece of white paper works well.

📂 File Formats & Image Sizes for Web Use

Technical specs matter because they affect how your photos look online and how quickly your website loads. Get this wrong and even great photos become useless.

• Shoot in highest quality setting, then resize for web. Starting with more data gives flexibility in editing and cropping. You can always make images smaller, but can’t add detail that wasn’t there.
• JPEG format works best for trade website photos. Creates smaller file sizes while maintaining good quality for photos with lots of detail and colour. PNG only needed for logos with transparent backgrounds.
• Aim for 100-300KB file sizes for web use. Larger files slow down your website, hurting user experience and SEO rankings. Most phones and basic editing apps compress images to appropriate sizes automatically.
• Learn social media dimensions. Instagram likes square photos (1080×1080), Facebook favours landscape (1200×630). Wrong dimensions crop out important parts of your work.
• Keep two versions of your best photos. High-resolution originals for print marketing or large displays, web-optimised versions for online use. Gives flexibility while keeping your website fast and user-friendly.

Editing & Optimising Your Trade Photos

📱 Quick Editing Apps for Busy Tradespeople

You don’t need to become a Photoshop expert to dramatically improve your trade photos. Several smartphone apps are designed for quick, effective editing that fits into your busy schedule between jobs.

Start with your phone’s built-in tools. iPhone and Android editing handles 80% of what you need – brightness, contrast, colour correction, and cropping. They’re free, always available, and work seamlessly with your camera roll.

• Snapseed is the Swiss Army knife of mobile editing. Simple enough to use in your van between jobs. The “Auto” button handles most corrections automatically, with manual controls for fine-tuning when needed.
• VSCO has excellent presets that instantly improve dull indoor photos. Fixes colour casts from mixed lighting. Free version includes everything most tradespeople need. Paid features are mainly artistic effects you probably won’t use.
• Lightroom Mobile is the best option if you’re willing to invest time learning. Adobe’s free version offers professional-grade tools. Paid version adds cloud sync and advanced features.

Pick one and stick with it. Consistency matters. Learn one app thoroughly rather than jumping between tools. Muscle memory counts when editing photos quickly on site. 

🤳 Basic Adjustments That Make a Big Difference

A few simple adjustments can transform mediocre trade photos into professional-looking portfolio pieces. Focus on these fundamentals rather than getting lost in complex filters and effects.

• Fix brightness and exposure first. The most common problem is underexposed images that hide your work. Brighten dark photos, but avoid going so far that whites blow out. Goal is revealing detail in shadows without losing information in highlights.
• Add contrast to flat, dull images. Mixed lighting often makes photos look washed out. Be subtle – too much contrast looks unnatural and over-processed.
• Correct colour problems. Fix yellow, green, or blue tints from artificial lighting. Use temperature slider to warm up cold-looking photos or cool down overly yellow images. Your whites should look white, not tinted.
• Straighten everything religiously. Crooked photos look unprofessional immediately. Straight lines indicate precision and attention to detail.
• Crop tightly. Eliminate distracting elements and focus attention on your work. Remove empty spaces, clutter and irrelevant background. Don’t dilute the impact of your work.

🏎️ Optimising Images for Website Speed

Large image files kill website performance, hurting user experience and search engine rankings. Customers won’t wait for slow-loading galleries, and Google penalises sluggish websites.

• Resize before uploading. Full-res phone photos can be 3-5MB each – way too big for web. Try to use the exact size you need for your template – many poeple export too large, which can be help with quality, but can negatively affect website speed.
• Compress file sizes. Aim for the lowest possible image size. Good quality while keeping load times reasonable. Works even on slower mobile connections. You can use an online compressor like TinyPNG or you can use a desktop compressor like ImageOptim (This is our go-to).
• Choose the right format. JPEG for photographs creates smaller files. PNG only when you need transparent backgrounds.

🧑‍⚖️ Adding Watermarks to Protect Your Work

Protecting high-quality trade website photos from unauthorised use makes business sense without being overly aggressive.

• Subtle works best. Small logo or business name in corner. Customers should see your craftsmanship clearly but still know who created the work.
• Position consistently. Bottom right corner is traditional and doesn’t interfere with most compositions. Use semi-transparent white or light grey text.
• Use different levels for different purposes. Light watermarks or none for social media gives better engagement. Moderate watermarking for website. Prominent watermarks for marketing materials.

Time to Show Off What You Can Really Do

You’ve got the skills. Every boiler you install, every panel you wire, every bathroom you transform – deserves to be seen.

Too many trades businesses lose work to competitors, not because their work is better, but because they know how to present themselves online. Meanwhile, skilled tradespeople with decades of experience get overlooked because of their blurry pics. 

Right now, someone’s searching for a tradesperson in your area. They’re scrolling through websites, making snap judgments based on what they see. When they land on yours, make sure they think “this person knows what they’re doing.”

Want help taking your business to the next level? We work exclusively with skilled tradespeople who are serious about growing their business. 

Drop us a line for a chat about getting your business the recognition it deserves. Because quality work should never go unnoticed. Get in touch today! 👋