Photography That Looks Like Everybody Else's

What a visitor is actually checking

Somebody landing on a local business website is not assessing your photography. They are establishing that you are real, that you do this work, and that the results look competent.

A stock photograph answers none of those, because it is evidence about a photograph rather than about you.

Worse, it can answer them negatively, since a visitor who recognises an image has learned that you had nothing of your own to show.

Which means the comparison is not between good stock and bad real photographs. It is between evidence and decoration.

The tells

• The same image on a competitor's site.
• Equipment or vehicles unlike anything you use.
• Buildings and landscapes that are not local.
• People in clothing nobody wears on a job.
• Lighting that no real site ever has.
• A handshake, which appears on everything.

The third is the strongest local signal. A visitor in British Columbia looking at a roof against a landscape that is plainly somewhere else has been told something specific.

Why businesses end up here

Rarely through laziness, which is worth acknowledging.

The site was built quickly and the builder filled the gaps, because a page with an empty image slot looks broken and a stock image does not.

Or the work is not photogenic, or is inside walls, or the business genuinely never took pictures while doing it.

Or the good photographs exist on somebody's phone and nobody has collected them.

That last one is the most common and the easiest to fix, since the material already exists and only needs gathering.

One real photograph is enough to start

The reassurance that makes this actionable.

A single photograph of finished work, taken on a phone, does more than six stock images.

It does not need to be good. It needs to be yours, recognisably local, and clearly the kind of work described on the page.

Replace the most prominent stock image first, which is usually the one at the top, and leave the rest until you have more.

A page with one honest photograph and five plain sections reads better than one fully illustrated with images from a library.

Perfection here is the enemy of doing it at all, and businesses wait years for a photographer who never gets booked.

A worked example

A business had a site with six stock photographs, professionally chosen and consistent in style.

A customer mentioned in passing that they had nearly not called, because the site looked like it could have belonged to anybody and they could not tell whether the business was local.

They replaced the top image with a phone photograph of a completed job, taken that week, with a recognisable street behind it.

Over the following months they added others as jobs finished.

Enquiries improved modestly and the comments changed noticeably: people began referring to specific work they had seen.

The stock images had been better photographs and the phone pictures were better evidence.

Where stock is still fine

Because the argument should not be absolute.

Backgrounds, textures, and abstract images that are decoration rather than evidence do no harm.

Illustrations and diagrams explaining a process are a different category entirely.

And a business that genuinely cannot photograph its work, for confidentiality or practical reasons, has to show something, in which case a general image with honest text is better than an empty page.

The distinction is whether the image is making an implicit claim about your work. Where it is, it should be your work.

Building a supply

The habit that solves this permanently.

Photograph every job, before and after, as routine rather than when somebody remembers.

Ask permission once, at the start, as part of the job rather than as an afterthought.

Collect them somewhere shared rather than leaving them on individual phones, which is where they otherwise stay.

Name them by job and date, so they can be found when a page needs one.

Six months of that produces a library no stock service can match, and it costs a few seconds per job.

What to fix in the photographs you have

Since the barrier is frequently that the real photographs look poor.

Most improve with three things: taking them in daylight, wiping the lens, and moving so the subject fills the frame.

Tidy the immediate area first, since a good result surrounded by mess reads as the mess.

Take several from different positions, which costs nothing and means one is usable.

Crop rather than photograph from a distance, and avoid using the digital zoom, which degrades the image.

None of that requires equipment or skill, and it lifts a phone photograph to entirely adequate.

People matter more than premises

A point about which real photographs are worth most, since not all of them do the same job.

Photographs of your actual staff, doing the actual work, outperform photographs of buildings, vehicles, and equipment.

That is because the visitor is deciding whether to let somebody into their home or onto their site, and a face is the thing that answers it.

It does not need to be posed. Somebody working, taken from a few steps back, is better than a portrait and considerably easier to obtain.

Ask staff first, since a photograph of somebody published without asking is a different problem, and most people agree readily when the reason is explained.

The counter-case

Real photographs can be worse.

A dark, cluttered, badly framed image of a mediocre result is not more persuasive than a clean stock image, and some businesses are better served by showing less.

For premium work in particular, poor photography actively undercuts the price, and paying a photographer for a small set of good images is a reasonable investment.

There are also sectors where stock is the convention and nobody expects otherwise.

Show your own work where the image is a claim about your work, take the trouble to make it adequate, and use stock only where it is decoration.

What to do

1. Search your images to see who else uses them.
2. Replace the top image first.
3. Use one phone photograph rather than waiting.
4. Photograph every job, before and after.
5. Ask permission at the start of the job.
6. Collect them somewhere shared.
7. Keep stock for decoration only.

Step one is worth doing before anything else, since finding your header image on two competitors' sites settles the argument faster than any reasoning.

Starting with almost nothing is covered in a builder site with one photograph.

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.