The humble art of photography for the farm website

Take photos of workers doing the work of growing food.Photography is a key to your successful farm website because websites are simply boring without visuals. You do not need to be professional photographer to take photos for your website -- just record your everyday life working and living on a farm and you will be exceptional to your customers.

My recommendation: buy an inexpensive digital camera (good ones can be found for under $200 these days), learn how to take photos and download them to your computer, and then carry your camera around in your truck or wherever is convenient on a daily basis. Consistency is the key to this process because you want to capture the whole life of the farm -- then upload the photos to your website on a regular basis to encourage your customers to come back to your site often.

Take photos of your whole day, but here are some specific subjects to focus on:

• Workers working: How are potatoes dug? What does it look like for someone to use a transplanter? Who drives the tractor? These are questions that can be answered succinctly by photography and constantly reminds your customers how their food is grown.
• Cooking: Take photos of the dishes you make out of the on farm produce -- farmers can cook too!
• Plants or animals in their natural habitat: What does the food look like before it goes on a customer's plate?
• Workers having fun: What do farm workers do in their spare time? Put a smiling face on the work.
Remind your customers of seasonality by taking photos year-round.
• All seasons: What does the farm look like in the winter when there are no customers around and no crops growing. Make sure customers remember you in the wintertime by adding photos all year-round.
  

Photos are also useful for blogging because each blog entry should include at least one relevant photo. As you take photos over a whole season and then multiple seasons, you will have a large library from which to choose photos that augment the topic of your farm blog.

For the photographically disinclined: delegate the task. Find a worker or spouse who likes to take photos and give them ownership of that task including uploading recent photos to your website.

Of course, the Small Farm Central website service makes it very easy to add photos to your website for those without a lot of technical skill. See this description of the process to see how to add a photo to a Small Farm Central site via the control panel.