This post used to argue the opposite. If you got here from an old link, that is why the URL redirected.
For years the honest answer to "do you do photography" was no. We directed content production, wrote the shot list, sat in on the edit, and hired a photographer near the client to actually operate the camera. That was the right call at the time and we said so publicly. It is not the right call any more, so we changed it. Changing a published position quietly is worse than having been wrong in the first place.
Mule shoots photography and video in-house now. Location, product, team, headshots, brand films, ads, testimonials, and the vertical cuts social actually wants. Same studio that builds the site and the system behind it.
What changed
Three things, none of them "we got ambitious".
The work changed shape. Most of what we build now is software: internal tools, customer portals, data platforms, apps. Those projects still need imagery, but a specific and unglamorous kind. A photo of the actual dispatch board. The technician using the actual app in the actual truck. The real flow on a real screen, not a mockup. Hiring that out meant explaining a whole system to a stranger before they could photograph it, every single time, and the pictures came back exactly as good as the explanation had been.
Coordination was costing more than the shoot. Briefing a photographer, scheduling around a client's working day, waiting on files, asking for a re-shoot of the one frame the hero needed, and doing all of it across a six-hour time difference. That overhead was real, it landed on the client's timeline, and none of it made the photographs better.
One shoot should feed everything. A crew that already knows what the homepage hero has to do, what the ad set is testing, and what the vertical cut has to accomplish in its first two seconds gets all three out of one visit. A crew hired for "some photos of the shop" gets photos of the shop.
What did not change
Everything in the original post that was about the pictures themselves still stands.
Bad photography is worse than no photography. A small-business site with one genuinely good real photo of the owner beats a site with twelve mediocre ones. That was true when we were hiring it out and it is true now that we are holding the camera. The bar did not move because the invoice did.
Stock and AI imagery still do not go on a client site. A stock photo of a friendly shopkeeper reads as fake to a customer in about thirty seconds. An AI-generated image of "you" reads as fake in five, and it is getting easier to spot, not harder. Real content earns trust. Fake content burns it, and it burns it on the exact page where you just asked somebody to call you.
We still say when a specialist is worth it. Finished-building architectural photography is its own discipline. So is high-end food for a menu that will be printed at scale. If your project is one of those and the money matters, we will tell you and recommend somebody, the same as we always did. We just no longer say it about every job.
What a shoot actually looks like
We build the shot list backwards, from the pages and the ads the images have to fill, so you are not left with sixty nice pictures and nothing that fits the hero. You get the list and a schedule before we show up, because "we'll see what we find" is how a shoot eats a working day.
A typical single-location shoot is half a day to a full day, planned for when your business is least disrupted, which for a lot of trades and shops means early. Where it makes sense we combine stills and video into one visit: same setup, same crew, one interruption instead of two.
You get web-optimised and print-ready sets, and the files are yours to use anywhere. Your site, your ads, your print, your sign, your supplier's catalogue. No per-use licence, no expiry, no call from us in a year asking you to renew something.
Travel inside Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin is quoted transparently and shown as its own line, never buried in a day rate.
The honest caveat
We are a small studio. We are not going to out-shoot somebody who has spent a decade on nothing but weddings, and we are not pretending otherwise. What we are better at than a hired camera is knowing what the picture is for, because we are also the ones building the page it lands on and, increasingly, the system behind that page.
If you already have photography you like, we work with it. If you need new work, we shoot it, and it is yours outright like everything else we make. Photography, videography.
Every project, imagery included, is quoted from your own brief. There is no price list, and there never was one for this.