Search for advice on photographing your work and you get the same article fifteen times: put the object on a white sheet, shoot from three angles, remove the background. That advice is written for people selling things in boxes. If you are a makeup artist, a salon, an interior designer, a caterer or a jeweller, you are not photographing a box. You are photographing a face, a room, a plate, or the difference between before and after.
This is the version nobody writes. It assumes a phone, a window, and no budget.
Light matters more than your phone
A ₹12,000 phone in good light beats a ₹90,000 phone in bad light, every single time. Nothing else on this page matters as much as this section.
The best light you have access to is a window, on an overcast day or on any side of the building the sun is not directly hitting. It is soft, it comes from one direction, and it makes skin, metal and food all look like themselves. Stand your subject beside the window — not in front of it, not under it — so the light crosses them from the side.
Three things to never do, and the first one is the one everybody does:
- Never use the flash. It flattens everything, makes skin shiny and turns gold the wrong colour. There is no situation in this article where the flash helps.
- Never shoot under the tubelight alone. The overhead white tubelight in most Indian shops and salons is the worst light in the building. It comes from directly above, so it puts shadows under eyes, noses and chins. If you cannot get to a window, turn on every warm lamp you have and get the subject away from directly underneath the tube.
- Never shoot in direct sunlight. Harsh sun blows out the bright parts and blocks up the dark parts, and you cannot fix either afterwards. Shade on a sunny day is excellent light.
What changes depending on what you do
The light rule is the same for everyone. What you point the phone at is not.
| If you do | The thing that actually decides the photo |
|---|---|
| Makeup, hair | Shoot at the client’s eye level or very slightly above it, never from below. Ask them to look just past the camera rather than into it. Get one full face, one at three-quarters, and one close on the eyes — that third one is what people zoom into. |
| Jewellery | Your enemy is reflection. Shoot in shade or by a window, never in sun, and watch what the metal is reflecting — usually you, in a dark shirt. Hold a white card where you want a bright highlight to appear. Gold photographs warm; do not correct it to grey. |
| Interiors | Hold the phone dead level so vertical lines stay vertical — a tilted phone makes walls lean and it is the single biggest tell of an amateur interior shot. Shoot from a corner to show two walls. Tidy ruthlessly. Turn the room’s own lamps on and use daylight. |
| Food, cakes | Two angles do almost everything: straight down for anything flat or spread out, and about 45° for anything with height. Shoot it immediately — food is only photogenic for a few minutes. |
| Before and after | Consistency is the entire point. Same spot, same distance, same angle, same light, same background. Mark the floor with tape if you have to. A dramatic result photographed from two different positions just looks like two different people. |
| Clothing, tailoring | On a person, not flat on a bed. Clothes only make sense when they have a body in them. If nobody is available, a hanger against a plain wall is a distant second best. |
beside the same subject shot under a tubelight.
The comparison does more than any paragraph here.
Hold it still
Most photos that look slightly soft are not out of focus, they are shaken. Tuck your elbows into your ribs, breathe out, then press. Better: lean the phone against a stack of books or a mug and use the two-second timer so nothing moves at the moment it fires. A phone tripod costs a few hundred rupees and is the only equipment on this page worth buying.
And wipe the lens. Phones live in pockets and bags, and a smeared lens is the most common reason a photo looks hazy and washed out. It takes one second on your shirt and it is free.
Shoot wide as well as tall
This is the mistake we see most often, and it only shows up later.
Everyone shoots vertically, because Instagram and WhatsApp status are vertical. Then they want a website, and a website header is wide. A vertical photo cropped to a wide banner loses the top and bottom of itself — which, for a portrait, is usually the hair and the chin.
Take every important shot twice — once holding the phone upright, once turned sideways. It costs you two seconds and it is the difference between having a website header and not having one.
What a website actually needs from you
When we build a site, this is the shot list we ask for. It is worth having even if you never build one, because a Google listing wants almost exactly the same things.
- One wide hero shot. Landscape, room around the subject, nothing important near the edges. This is the first thing anyone sees.
- Eight to twelve gallery shots of finished work, shot roughly the same way so they sit together as a set. A gallery of twelve consistent photos looks more professional than a gallery of thirty inconsistent ones.
- One photograph of you. People book people. This is the single most skipped and most valuable shot on the list.
- One of where you work — the studio, the chair, the kitchen, the shop front. It tells someone you are real.
Editing: less than you think
Straighten it, crop it, lift the brightness slightly if it is dark. Stop there. Heavy filters date fast and, worse, they change the colour of what you are selling — a bride who books a look that was orange in the photo and pink in the chair is an unhappy bride. The only honest edit is the one that makes the photo look more like the thing looked in the room.
If you only take one thing from this page: move your work next to a window and turn the flash off. That one change does more than a new phone will.