Photography for small brands without a budget

Most of the small brands the studio works with cannot afford commissioned photography. The choices, in those projects, are usually three: stock libraries, the client’s existing in-house photography (often badly lit and inconsistent), or images shot on a smartphone by the studio or the client. A short note on what produces the most useful results in each case.

Stock, when it must be used.

Skip the free libraries. Unsplash, Pexels, and the rest are the visual equivalent of clip art. Anything memorable in their catalogues is being used by twenty thousand other sites. The studio’s default for paid stock is Stocksy, which is curated, member-owned, and stylistically consistent. Death to Stock is a worthwhile second.

When using paid stock, treat the choices as if they were commissioned. Pick a small set of photographers and use multiple images from each. The brand reads as more coherent than if every image came from a different photographer.

The client’s in-house photography.

Almost always inconsistent. Some images well-shot. Some not. Most studios use whatever the client sends. The result is a brand that looks like a folder of photographs, not a brand.

The cleanest fix, where budget allows for an hour or two of editing, is to colour-grade everything to a single shared treatment. A consistent grade ties images that were shot in different conditions into a single visual world. The grade does not need to be heavy. Often a slight desaturation, a small lift in shadow, and a consistent white balance is enough.

The studio’s default treatment is set up as a Lightroom preset that the client can apply themselves to new images. The client gets ongoing visual coherence. The studio does not have to be in the loop on every new shoot.

Smartphone photography, for clients who have nothing.

A modern smartphone is a better camera than most professional cameras from a decade ago. Used badly, it produces snapshot images that are obviously snapshots. Used with a small amount of discipline, it produces images that read as professional in the contexts most small brands need them.

A few things that have made the studio’s smartphone work better.

Shoot in the camera’s native resolution, not in a social media app. The processed images apps produce are colour-managed for the app’s audience, not for the brand.

Shoot in flat lighting. North-facing window light, or an overcast day, removes the harsh shadows that mark a snapshot.

Shoot from a tripod, or rest the phone against a stable surface. Most smartphone images that look bad look bad because of camera shake or because the photographer was leaning into the shot.

Shoot wide and crop. The native aspect ratio of a phone is rarely what the brand needs. Shooting at a wider crop than the final use gives flexibility in composition.

Shoot a lot. The shot count for a casual smartphone photographer is in the dozens. The shot count for a professional is in the hundreds. Volume produces good frames, even when each frame is mediocre.

For the colour-grading step, the studio uses Adobe Lightroom for the desktop work and VSCO for the on-phone treatments where the smartphone shoot is the source. Either is overkill for what most small brands need; both are more reliable than free alternatives. The companion piece on working with photographers covers the with-budget case.

The studios that handle small-brand photography well are not the ones with bigger budgets. They are the ones who have systematised the no-budget case so that the no-budget version of the work still reads as considered. The no-budget case is, by far, the more common one. Worth getting right.