The short version
Twelve to twenty good photos is plenty for a five-page salon site: one wide shot of the space, a portrait of you, three or four of the room, and six to ten pieces of finished work. Your phone is genuinely good enough if you shoot near a window, avoid the overhead salon lights, and export at 1500 pixels wide.
This is the step that delays most salon websites, and it should not. You do not need a photographer to launch. You need about twenty usable images, and your phone will take most of them.
The actual shot list
The space — 4 to 5 photos
- One wide shot from the door, showing the room as a client first sees it. This is usually your homepage hero, so shoot it more carefully than the rest.
- The styling stations, empty and tidy.
- Any feature wall — neon, plants, brand mark. This is what people photograph and post.
- The waiting area if you have one.
- A detail shot — product shelf, a chair, the reception desk.
People — 2 to 4 photos
- One good portrait of you. Non-negotiable. People book people, and this is consistently the most-viewed image on a salon site after the hero.
- Each stylist, if you have a team.
- One candid of someone working, which does more for trust than any posed shot.
Your work — 6 to 10 photos
The most important group, and the one most salons get wrong by posting only finished-and-styled blonde. Show range: different lengths, different colours, different skin tones and hair textures. A client scanning your gallery is looking for someone who looks like them.
Shoot near a window, and turn away from the overhead lights. Salon lighting is designed to help you work, not to photograph well — it is usually too warm, too directional, and it makes blonde look brassy and skin look orange. Daylight from a window fixes almost everything.
Getting decent photos on a phone
- Clean the lens. It is smeared. It is always smeared, and it is why your photos look hazy.
- Shoot in daylight — window light, subject facing it.
- Tap to focus on the hair, then drag down slightly to darken. Phones overexpose blonde badly.
- Avoid the ultra-wide lens for people. It distorts faces. Use 1x or 2x.
- Shoot both orientations. Vertical for phones, horizontal for wide sections. You will want both.
- Take five of each. Storage is free, reshoots are not.
- Do not use portrait mode on hair. It blurs flyaways and edges, which is exactly the detail you are selling.
What to avoid
- Heavy filters. If your colour work is filtered, clients cannot judge the colour — and they will notice the mismatch in the chair.
- Screenshots of Instagram posts. They arrive compressed, cropped and often with UI in frame.
- Cluttered backgrounds. Tidy the station before you shoot.
- Stock photos of other people’s work. Clients can tell, and it undermines everything else on the page.
Sizes and formats
- Export at 1500 pixels on the long edge. Sharp on any phone, small enough to load fast.
- JPEG at around 80% quality, or WebP if your platform supports it.
- Aim for 100–300 KB per image. If yours are 3 MB, they are unresized.
- Name the files descriptively — balayage-nashville-salon.jpg, not IMG_4821.jpg. It is a small SEO signal and it costs nothing.
When a photographer is worth it
A half-day shoot runs roughly $300–$800 in most markets and is worth it if you are rebranding, opening, or your space is genuinely beautiful and your phone shots are not doing it justice. If money is tight, spend it on one good portrait of you and shoot the rest yourself.
Do not let this delay you
The most common reason a salon website sits unfinished is waiting for perfect photos. Launch with your phone shots. Swap them for better ones later — it takes minutes. A live site with decent photos beats a perfect site that never ships.
What a good photo set looks like in place
Send me what you have. I will tell you what is missing.
Phone photos are fine. I handle the cropping, resizing and optimising. $399 to launch, $50 a month.
See what I build →