Photography for websites

Do your photographs sell your products?

You cannot always be there to sell your products, when a customer is viewing your website or reading your brochure, your photographs need to do that for you.

A website is a significant investment and selling a product online depends on the quality of the pictures used to show what you are selling.

Want us to take your photographs in Cumbria

Not so long ago, the concept of simply taking a photograph, attaching it to an email, then sending it across the world, in a matter of minutes was unheard of. Now it's one of the simplest and most cost effective ways of doing business.

Taking a good professional looking photograph is not just a case of point and shoot . Controlling the light is critical. Well balanced and neutral lighting will bring your product shots to life whereas bad lighting will destroy them.

Most web design companies expect you to provide all the pictures require for your website and online store. This can be a shock for most businesses as it is something that is usually not in the budget, finding a photographer who understands the limitations of web design work can be difficult and expensive.

Good quality pictures can make the sale - compare the two pictures on the left. Which thermometer would you buy??

Equipment needed to take good website photographs

"VERY nice a LOT better, well done thanks. It does pay to have a good picture, in fact puts a lot of others on the website to shame. At that quality they may be a few more"

Optimisation of Images

The key to putting up images on the web is optimisation. It's vital to compress the images down as much as possible as large images = unhappy surfers.

60% enjoy high speed web access but there is still a lot using with creaking dialup modems - and don't forget those on the road accessing through laptops and slow data cell phone connections of PDA's

People don't like to wait for pages to download, so if we work on the assumption that they'll start to get twitchy after a nine second wait, that gives you an upper limit of an 18k page size for 14.4 modems, 35k for 28.8 or 85k for 56. Not much to work with!

Keeping the load time of your pages down is critical. The larger the file, the longer the user is has to wait for it to appear - and the more likely they are to leave and go elsewhere.

Most digital cameras come with graphics programs which offer tools to optimise and export files in the most popular web formats.

Software for Optimising Pictures for Websites