These days, everyone with an up-to-date smartphone can create semi-decent photographs. They might be enough to take lovely family photos and food shots for the ‘gram’, but when it comes to your business photography, quality counts. So, are photos taken on a smartphone good enough for business use, or do you need to upgrade your game?
Website
Your website is your business’s shopfront. Giving a bad first impression can put a potential customer off forever, so making sure you’re putting your best foot forward is essential. Blurry, pixelated photos are an obvious no-no, but you might not have thought about optimising image sizes and dimensions to make sure they display responsively and don’t slow down the load speed of your site.
Not only that, but even the best amateur photographer is still just that: an amateur. Lighting, composition, and editing shouldn’t be neglected when the stakes are so high. When it comes to your website, professional photos are the best choice.
Print media
Online photos can be replaced or deleted if required, but once you commit to a print run you’re really committed. That means making sure everything, from the copy to the colours, the fonts to the photographs, are pitch perfect. A badly stretched image, poor colouration, or blurry photograph can be the difference between an impactful piece of print marketing and an embarrassing mistake.
While smartphone images might be good enough used sparingly, if you really have something to show off, a professional photoset is invaluable. Plus, an expert eye on the colour treatment of images being sent to print cannot be underestimated.
Social media
This is one area where smartphones come into their own. After all, social media thrives on images taken in one moment and uploaded in the next. That doesn’t mean the photos can be low-quality; they should still be thoughtfully composed, well-edited and relevant to the message you’re trying to convey.
That’s not to say that professional photography has no place on social media, far from it. Our recommendation is that stories (i.e. images that only last 24 hours, in portrait mode) are perfectly reasonable places to use smartphone photography. However, images that will stay on your feed for longer should be of higher quality, after all, you never know how far back a potential customer might browse in order to help them make a decision about your business.
Professional photography can really tip your business over the edge from slightly homely to glowing and engaging, so the services of a professional photographer should absolutely be something you consider.
