Photographs Worth Taking Before Winter

The window closes

A great deal of what a business would want to show happens in a season, and cannot be recreated outside it.

Landscaping in bloom, exterior work in daylight, a shop with its seasonal display, a busy premises, work in weather that has now passed.

In March, planning content for the spring, the photographs you will wish you had are the ones somebody could have taken in September and did not.

Which makes this a scheduling problem rather than a photography one: the shooting has to happen when the subject exists, and the using happens months later.

Photograph for six months ahead

The habit that resolves it, and it requires thinking about a use that does not exist yet.

Before a season ends, ask what you will want to publish during and after it: a service page refresh, a campaign, a listing update, an article about preparing for next year.

Then take the pictures that would support those, even though nothing is written yet.

Taking too many is the correct error, since storage costs nothing and a return visit costs a day.

Businesses that do this have material all year. Businesses that do not are always photographing whatever is in front of them this week, which is why so many sites show one season.

What is worth having

• Finished work, in good light, from several angles.
• Before and during, which explains the finished shot.
• The premises looking as it does at its best.
• People working, which almost no small site has.
• Detail shots of things you are proud of.
• Wide shots with room to crop later.

The second is the most valuable and the most often missed, because a before photograph has to be taken when nobody is thinking about photography at all.

The trades problem specifically

Worth naming, because it is the sharpest version of this.

Exterior work stops or slows in winter, so a roofer, a landscaper, or a builder finishes their photogenic season and then has months where the only available images are of work in poor light and bad weather.

That is exactly the period when the site is being updated, the campaign is being planned, and the listing needs photographs.

So the images used to sell spring work are frequently the worst ones taken all year.

Shooting deliberately in the last weeks of the season, with the specific intention of using it in February, solves a problem that otherwise recurs annually.

Light in December

A practical note for anything that must be shot now.

Usable daylight is short and low, so plan around the middle of the day rather than fitting photography in at the end of one.

Overcast is better than bright winter sun for most work, because low sun produces hard shadows across everything and blows out anything pale.

Interiors need more care than in summer: turn the lights on, avoid shooting toward windows, and take several so one is usable.

Where the light is genuinely poor, a photograph of a detail is better than a wide shot of something murky, and it will be more useful later anyway.

A worked example

A landscaping business photographed jobs as they finished, on phones, throughout the year.

Every February they rebuilt their site content for the spring and found that their best material was from July, that they had almost nothing showing planting at its best, and that several of the most impressive jobs had no before photographs at all.

One autumn they spent a single afternoon revisiting four completed sites with the owner's phone, photographing them properly in good light.

They also started taking a before shot as a matter of routine, on arrival, before any work began.

The following February the content took a fraction of the time and used images from the right season.

The owner's remark was that the before photographs had turned out to be worth more than the finished ones, because they explained what the work involved.

Label them or lose them

The step that determines whether any of this is usable.

A folder of four thousand images with camera filenames is not an archive, it is a problem, and nobody will find the right one in March.

Name folders by month and place, at minimum, and rename the handful you know are good.

Keep the originals at full resolution rather than only the versions resized for the site, since a cropped web image cannot be recovered into a print or a wider shot.

And get them off the phone: onto a drive the business owns, monthly, with the same person responsible each time.

Ask before you publish

The permission question, briefly, because it comes up with seasonal work.

Photographs of a customer's property, and particularly of anybody in them, need permission before publication, and the easiest time to ask is while you are there and they are pleased with the work.

A verbal yes is common practice and a note of the date and what was agreed is better, particularly for anything you expect to use for years.

Avoid house numbers, vehicle registrations, and identifiable interiors unless you have asked specifically.

Staff in photographs should also be asked rather than assumed, and told where the image will appear.

The counter-case

Not every business has a season worth chasing.

Indoor work, professional services, and anything where the output is a document rather than a place look the same in January as in July, and there is no window closing.

There is also a risk in producing a large archive nobody uses, which is a common outcome: thousands of images, no labelling, and content still being written without pictures because finding one takes too long.

The photographs are only worth taking if somebody will find them, which makes the labelling the load-bearing part rather than the shooting.

Take fewer, label them properly, and use them.

The afternoon

1. Ask what you will publish in February and March.
2. Shoot for that before the season ends.
3. Take a before shot on arrival, as routine.
4. Shoot wide so you can crop later.
5. Ask permission while you are there.
6. Label folders by month and place.
7. Move them off phones monthly, at full resolution.

Step three costs ten seconds per job and produces the images that turn out to be the most useful.

Keeping a listing current is covered in photos on a listing, six months later.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.