When you’re building a new website, you need more than a couple of good photographs.

For M&Z Engineering, I photographed one of their projects while construction was underway, creating a broad library of commercial imagery for their new website.

The shoot covered everything from wider photographs showing the build in progress through to structural details, materials, tools and the team working on site.

Showing the work in progress

A completed project is great to photograph, but there’s also a huge amount worth documenting while the work is actually happening.

Throughout the shoot I photographed the structure at different scales, from wider views of the construction through to close details of the timber framing, fixings, connections and materials.

Those smaller details help build out a much more complete gallery and give a website designer plenty to work with beyond a collection of wide photographs.

Photographing people actually doing the work

Alongside the construction itself, I photographed the M&Z Engineering team working and inspecting the project on site.

Rather than every photograph being posed or looking directly at the camera, the gallery includes people discussing the build, checking details, working with plans and tools, and moving naturally through the site.

It creates imagery that shows both the people behind the business and the type of environment they actually work in.

Building an image library for a new website

Website photography needs variety.

A large banner image needs something completely different from a photograph sitting beside a paragraph of text. Sometimes you need a wide environmental image. Sometimes a vertical photograph. Sometimes it’s a close-up detail, a person at work or an image with enough negative space for a designer to place copy over it.

So throughout a commercial shoot like this, I’m not only looking for the obvious hero photographs. I’m deliberately creating different compositions, orientations, distances and details so the finished gallery gives the website designer plenty of options to work with.

For M&Z Engineering, that meant creating a collection that covered the project itself, the details within it and the people behind the work.