Why Manufacturing Businesses Need Better Photography

We often work with small, family owned and run businesses in the industrial and manufacturing sector, and we hear something similar with nearly every enquiry: “We need to update our website photography, but we don’t really know what we need.” 

That was exactly the case with a recent steel fabrication client, a business with genuinely impressive work on the floor and almost nothing to show for it online.

This is where we start: taking a look at the client’s existing website and working out which photos need improving or expanding, which elements are still doing their job and can stay (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it), and more often than not, what’s missing altogether. 

For this client, that meant a proper profile photo of the business owner, something we regularly find missing and which does a lot of quiet work building trust with potential clients before they’ve even picked up the phone.

More often than not, small business owners and their employees don’t want their photo taken – so many of these businesses have never engaged a photographer to come in and document what they actually do. That reluctance was front and centre with this steel fabrication team, and it’s a genuinely common pattern in industrial and manufacturing settings: it’s often the older, more experienced tradespeople and business owners who are the most resistant to photography and video.

Our job as photographers starts well before we walk in the door with a bag full of gear that can look intimidating to people who aren’t used to it. It starts on the phone or by email, explaining what we think is worth photographing, asking what the client wants documented, and being clear from the outset that this is a collaborative project – we’re working with them, not doing something to them, to get the best outcome for their business.

On the shoot day itself, we take it slowly with the subjects who need it. A walk-through with the business owner is usually the best place to start – they’ll talk through the production line, point out specialised equipment, and explain what actually matters about how the business runs. That conversation naturally surfaces angles they hadn’t considered and good locations for photographing key staff.

Having the camera in hand to show people a few shots on the back of the screen does more to take the mystery and fear out of the process than almost anything else. It’s also the right moment to reassure everyone that the goal is to show them in the best light, and that we’ll keep sharing images as we go so they can flag anything they’d rather see done differently. In effect, we hand control back to the client; which, for a group of blokes who didn’t want their photo taken an hour earlier, tends to make all the difference.