Crew photo shot list for every job

The reason your company does not have project pages is almost never that you do not want them. It is that the photos do not exist by the time you sit down to write one.

Print this. Put it in the truck. One person on the crew owns it.

Before anything moves

• Wide shot of the whole area from where the customer will stand to look at it
• The problem, whatever it is. Standing water, dead grass, an old failed pond, an ugly slope
• The access route from the street or driveway

Excavation

• The dig in progress, with the machine in frame
• Depth, with something in frame for scale. A shovel, a tape, a person
• The spoil pile

Plumbing and liner

• Underlayment down
• Liner in place before rock
• Plumbing runs before they get buried. This one matters most and gets forgotten every time
• The skimmer and biofalls set

Rockwork

• Progress, at least twice
• One close shot of a good joint or a feature stone
• The waterfall structure before water

Finish

• First fill, water going in
• Planting
• Finished, wide, from the same spot as the very first photo
• Finished, close, at the waterfall
• Finished at night if there is lighting
• Fifteen seconds of vertical video with the water running and real sound, no music

Two rules

Same angle for the first and last wide shot. That pairing is the single most effective image you will ever post.

Shoot horizontal for the website and vertical for social. Take both. It costs four seconds.

Where they go

Straight into a folder named for the job. Not the camera roll. When you build the project page, everything is already in one place and in order.