Your camera roll is probably full of marketing you never used. Here is how to take work photos that do the selling for you. None of this needs a real camera, and all of it works whether or not you ever use PopJar.
1. Take the "before" before you start
The single most valuable photo in the trades is the one most people forget: the mess before you touched it. A finished roof is nice. A finished roof next to the worn one it replaced is proof. Make "before photo" the first step of the job, the same way you put on boots.
This is just as true outside the trades. Bakers: the empty bench, then the finished cake. Musicians: the empty room at load-in, then the crowd.
2. Same spot, same angle
Stand where you stood. A before-and-after only lands when the two photos obviously show the same place. Pick a landmark, a corner, a driveway seam, and shoot both photos from it. Two steps to the left ruins the trick.
3. Light beats gear
Phones are great now; darkness is still darkness. Shoot with the sun behind you, or wait ten minutes for the cloud. Golden hour makes even gutter work look cinematic. Inside, turn on every light in the room and stand with a window at your back.
4. Get one photo with a person in it
Hands working, a crew member on the ladder, you at the counter. People stop scrolling for people. You do not need faces if the crew is shy; gloves on a railing say "real humans did this" just fine.
One rule we hold hard at PopJar and recommend to everyone: only real photos of real work. Never stage a fake before, and never borrow a photo that is not yours. One caught fake costs more trust than a hundred real posts earn.
5. Shoot five, keep five
Storage is free and the moment is not. Take five shots of the finish: wide, close, detail, angle, person. You will not sort them today, and that is fine. The point is that the material exists.
What happens to those photos next
For most businesses, the honest answer is: nothing. They sit in the phone forever, which is the whole reason we built PopJar. You send it the photos and a sentence, and it builds the finished, branded post for you. If that sounds useful, see what PopJar does with your photos, or find your kind of business and see real examples.