One of the most expensive mistakes I see is a business that shoots a beautiful set of images and then discovers none of them work as a website banner. Different destinations need different frames and it costs nothing to plan for both.
Instagram wants vertical and tight
Feed and story real estate is vertical. The subject sits centre and fills the frame, because the image is being viewed on a phone at arms length in about a second. Detail at the edges is wasted.
Websites want wide and empty
A hero banner is wide, often extremely wide, and your designer needs a large clean area for a headline and a button. That means composing with the subject to one side and deliberate empty space beside them. An image that looks strangely unbalanced on its own is frequently the perfect website hero.
Shoot every important setup three ways
- Vertical and tight for stories, reels and the feed
- Square or four by five for grid posts, which is the largest feed format
- Wide with space to one side for website banners and email headers
It is three shutter presses at the same setup. Doing it later means booking another shoot.
Do not crop your way out of it
You can crop a wide image down to a vertical one, losing resolution and usually the composition. You cannot crop a tight vertical into a wide banner, because the pixels simply are not there. Always capture the widest version you might need.
Watch the safe zones
Platform interface elements cover parts of your image. Story text, profile icons and buttons all sit over the top and bottom. Keep anything essential away from the outer edges so the platform does not cover it.
One grade across everything
Your website and your social should look like the same brand. I grade a full session to one consistent look for exactly this reason, so an image pulled from the set six months later still matches everything around it.
