Using the pictures

Real machines on real properties, in honest light. A plain photograph of a unit doing its job beats a polished studio shot, because plain is what gets believed.

The three pictures worth having

The machine at work. Hitched behind the customer's own vehicle, mid-pass, collecting. This is the main one and most pages need it.

The property. Good fences, a tidy arena, a clean paddock, a well-kept reserve. This is the aspirational half. People are buying the result on their own place, and the property in the background says it better than the machine does.

The detail. The catcher, the brush, the hitch, the remote. Close enough to see how it is made.

The machine is always behind something

Tow and Collect tows behind what the customer already owns: a Kubota RTV, a side-by-side, an ATV, a small tractor. That is the proposition, so a photograph of the machine on its own does not carry it.

If you only have a shot of the bare machine, it belongs on a spec page, not on a hero or an ad.

Where the red banner goes

Most hero photographs carry an angled red banner with a line in the brush face across them. That constrains where the machine can sit in the frame.

Shoot with the banner in mind, or pick a frame with room for it. If the banner lands on the machine or across someone's face, the photograph is the wrong one, not the banner.

The banner is a solid red block, so the words on it are white on red and always readable. That is the point of it: you never have to measure whether the photograph underneath is too light.

Text straight onto a photograph

Without a banner behind it, white text on a photograph has to be checked.

Look at the lightest patch behind the words, not the average. That is where white gives out. A bright sky or sunlit grass behind a headline is the usual failure.

• If the lightest patch is dark enough, ship it clean.
• If it is borderline, only a large headline can sit on it. Nothing at body size.
• If it is bright, put a dark wash over the photograph or use the red banner.
• Over video, always use a wash. One still frame proves nothing about the other nine hundred.

Never

Stock photography. A stranger in a clean checked shirt leaning on a fence undoes every honest sentence on the page. People can tell.

AI generated scenes. Same problem, and worse: it is stock photography with extra steps, and the details are wrong in ways that farmers and horse people notice immediately.

CAD renders instead of photographs. Renders are fine on a spec diagram, and only if it is obvious that is what they are.

Photographs of the machine clean in a yard. It reads as a showroom. This is working equipment.

People without permission. Anyone recognisable in a photograph needs to have agreed to it, and so does their property.

Treatment

Keep the grade natural. Do not push the saturation to make the grass greener: the people looking at it know what their own paddock looks like.

Shoot on an overcast day or in the back half of the afternoon. Midday sun blows out the catcher and loses the machine against the ground.

Use 4:3 for cards and tiles, 16:9 for video, and full-width for a hero with the machine held right of centre.

Alt text

Every photograph on a website needs a line describing what is happening, for people using a screen reader and for search.

Describe the picture, do not sell in it:

1500 Pro E behind a Kubota RTV, collecting horse manure on a Waikato arena.

Not "the best pasture cleaner available". That is not what the picture shows.