The trouble with stock
Stock photography is not banned and it is not always wrong. A texture, a landscape, an abstract background — fine. The problem is people. The moment a visitor sees four attractive strangers laughing around a laptop, they learn one thing: these are not your staff, this is not your office, and everything nearby might also be decorative.
There is also a licensing point that people ignore until it becomes a letter. "Found on the internet" is not a licence. Neither is "it was on the first page of image search". Keep a record of where every image came from and what the licence permits. If you cannot produce that record, do not use the image.
Taking them yourself, properly
You do not need a camera. You need light and a bit of patience.
- Shoot near a window, not under the ceiling lights. Overcast daylight is the most forgiving light there is. Turn the room lights off; mixing them makes skin tones go strange.
- Get closer than feels natural. Hands doing the work, the tool, the finished thing. Close detail reads as real; wide shots of an empty room read as an estate agent listing.
- Take thirty, keep three. The hit rate is low for everybody. Volume is the entire technique.
- Photograph the process, not just the result. The half-finished job is more interesting and more convincing than the tidy final shot, because anyone can photograph a tidy final shot.
- Leave empty space around the subject. Text has to go somewhere. A perfectly framed photo is often unusable in a layout.
- Resize before uploading. Straight off a phone they are enormous and they will make the site crawl.
Designing honestly around having none
Sometimes there is nothing worth photographing yet. A bookkeeper's office is a desk. In that case the right answer is not to fake it — it is to build a design that does not need photographs.
Type, colour, generous space, structured data, well-set numbers and a clear layout can carry a page completely. Some of the most convincing small-business sites I have seen have no photographs at all, and read as deliberate rather than unfinished. That is a design decision available to you, and it is free.
The failure is not "no photos". The failure is a layout with photo-shaped holes in it, filled with whatever was to hand. A visitor can tell the difference instantly.
What I would do this week
Two hours with a phone near a window. Shoot the work, the tools, the space, and one honest portrait of yourself that is not a cropped wedding photo. That last one matters more than the rest combined: on a small-business site, the face of the person who will turn up is the strongest evidence you have.