Photography on a premium website

The image decides before the design does

On the site of a hotel, a restaurant, an architecture practice or a high-end service brand, the first impression comes from neither the typography nor the layout. It comes from the first photograph, and it forms before the visitor has read anything.

That is why a carefully designed site filled with stock imagery disappoints: the visitor cannot name what is wrong, but they know they have seen that laid table, that hotel corridor, that laughing couple before. The message that lands is not "this is handsome", it is "I cannot see what you actually sell".

Real photography does the opposite job. It proves that the place, the dish or the project exists, and it proves it without a sentence.

Three sources, three costs

There are only three ways to get the images for a site, and the choice is made project by project rather than once and for all.

• A commissioned shoot. The only way to get exactly the frames the layout needs. It is also a real budget line, to which you must add preparing the location — which often takes more time than the shoot itself.
• An existing archive. Most established businesses have one: old shoots, press photography, images made for a brochure. It is almost always under-used, often because nobody has the original files. Check what you own before paying to produce more.
• Stock. Defensible for anything that is not your place, your product or your work: a texture, a background, a map, an abstract illustration. Indefensible for the thing the client came to see.

What actually needs photographing

The shot list follows from the layout, not the other way round. A site needs a small number of images doing a precise job, and a large number doing none — the latter are the ones paid for and never used.

Four kinds of image do almost all the work on a premium site.

• An opening image. Wide, with air, and with empty space where the headline will sit. It is the one image whose framing must be decided with whoever designs the page.
• The proof. The actual rooms, the actual dishes, the actual projects, in the state a client will find them. A room photographed with the bed as it is made every day beats a styled room that resembles nothing of what will be delivered.
• The details. A handle, a material, a hand at work. These are the images that carry the sense of quality, and they are the ones nobody remembers to commission.
• The faces. The team, the chef, the architect. On the site of an owner-led business these are often the most-looked-at images on the whole site, and almost always the worst executed.

The web constraints nobody tells the photographer

A shoot delivered for a brochure does not drop into a website as-is. Three constraints are settled at the moment of shooting and repair very badly afterwards.

• The same subject in two formats. A hero image is very wide on a desktop and almost square on a phone. Without a second, more vertical frame, the mobile crop cuts the subject. Ask for both during the shoot: it costs nothing on the day and costs a second shoot afterwards.
• Room for text. A perfectly composed photograph with the subject dead centre has nowhere to put a headline. A quiet area — a wall, a sky, a tablecloth — is what makes an image usable as a hero.
• The original files. Ask for full resolution, not versions prepared for social media. A website generates the sizes it needs from an original; it cannot rebuild what compression has removed.

Beautiful images and a slow site: the false dilemma

The fear is real and the conclusion is wrong. A site full of images can stay fast, provided the work is done at build time rather than left to the browser.

Three measures cover almost every case: deliver each photograph at several widths and let the browser pick the one that matches the screen; use a modern image format rather than the original JPEG; and load only what is visible, the rest arriving on scroll.

A fourth, less well known, prevents the most visible fault: writing each image’s dimensions into the page. Without them the text jumps as the photographs arrive, and that jump is what a visitor remembers as a "badly made" site, even if they could not name it.

Rights: the question always asked too late

A photograph belongs to the photographer unless a written agreement says otherwise. That holds in Morocco as elsewhere, and it holds for a shoot you paid for.

Four points are settled in the quote, one line each: is web use included; for how long; on which media — a website, social media and paid advertising are not the same thing; and is a credit required.

For people photographed, a written release is required as soon as they are recognisable, employees included. For a private interior, the owner’s agreement. These are ten-minute formalities that prevent pulling an image off a site two years later.

An order of priority when the budget is limited

Few projects photograph everything. The following order gives the most effect per dirham spent, and it holds for most trades where the image sells.

• The hero image, in both framings. It is the only one every visitor sees.
• What the client buys: the rooms, the dishes, the projects. One per item, properly lit, rather than three approximate ones.
• One portrait of the owner or the team.
• A set of details, the quickest to produce and the set that gives a layout the most to work with.

Frequently asked

And at Noor Studio Agency?

This is a position we hold in practice: the sites we delivered for Maison Saffron and Noor Architect were built around real photography, and we would rather move a launch date than fill a page with stock. When an existing archive is enough, we say that too.