If you have shopped for a car online you likely realize that it doesn't take much to stand out with competently exposed, thoughtfully composed pictures of the car you are selling. From the pictures included in some online sites, you might think the ad was some sort of contest to guess the make and model of the car they are selling. Even if you are just using your cell phone, taking the time to shoot your car properly can make you money, and speed up the sale.
Do not do this! The sun is too bright and high in the sky. The photographer is too close to the car and too high, The background is too busy and at the same time, too close in color to the car being photographed. Find a nice location, choose an attractive background, get out of the sun, step back and use a longer zoom setting.
You won’t be able to match the maker’s own professionally lit and photographed publicity photos, but here are 10 photography tips for onine car listings that anyone can use to take better car pictures. (Our UK office originally wrote this, so the example car is the right hand drive Citreon DS3, but that doesn't change any of the tips.):
- Start With a Clean Car - It sounds obvious, but you would be amazed at how many people don’t bother to even wash their car before taking pictures. Don’t assume buyers can ‘see through’ the dirt to the wonderful car underneath. They’re more likely to imagine that if you don’t care enough to wash it, you may not have cared enough to maintain it in other ways. Washing can leave drying spots and detergent marks, so finish off with a coat of wax and a buff. Better still, take along a buffing cloth to your photo shoot location just in case.
- Location, Location, Location - Non-photographers tend to photograph things wherever they happen to be rather than looking for the best location. Unless the street outside your house looks spectacular, look for a better nearby location with attractive, uncluttered surroundings, like a seldom traveled country lane, the beach, or a scenic mountain overlook. Even an empty parking lot, or blank brick wall can make for nicer pictures. Regular streets are just too full of other cars, passers-by, lampposts, signs and other distractions.
- Wait Until Later - That’s surprising, right? But it’s true – mid-day sunlight is good for sunbathing but bad for car photography. Too bright of light overhead produces harsh contrasts between light and shade that can make your picture look jumbled and ugly. The professional photographers like to work in the "golden hour" just before the sun goes down, or right after it comes up. Overcast light is also much subtler, and the reflection of the clouds in the sky on your car’s bodywork will really bring out its glossy contours.
- Step Back - When you stand too close to an object and use the wide angle setting on your camera (typically the default setting), you distort its perspective. With a wide angle lens, objects in the foreground (closest to you) will look much bigger than those in the background (further away), even if part of the same car. Cars are like people – they look better if you stand a little further away and use a longer focal length setting on the zoom lens. A longer lens flattens out the perspective and gives the car an appearance much closer to what the human eye sees in real life.
- Proper Crop - When you park your car to photography it, you should be paying more attention to the background than practically anything else. Don’t park it right up against a wall or a hedge, but bring it forward so that there is room to drive another car between them. Then, before posting the photo, resize and crap it to make the car dominate the image and fill the frame. One of the other advantages of using a longer lens is that it will make the background more out of focus and give your photo a more professional look. The sharply focused car against a fuzzy background makes the subject pop in your mind's eye.
- Turn the Wheels - The classic angle for photographing a car is a front three-quarter view, where you see both the front and the side, because it makes a much more dramatic picture than just the side or front view. But you can take this a step further by turning the front wheels toward, or away from the direction the car is pointing. This small adjustment immediately gives the car a more stylish, more dynamic appearance. While you’re at it, pay attention to any logos on the wheels – if you are a real pro, these need to be the right way up and as horizontal as possible. Believe it or not, professional car photographers spend serious amounts of time on tiny details like this.
- The Low Down - Do you know what the biggest difference between the last two photos is? Yes, the background is different, and the wheels are pointing in the opposite directions, but that is not it. The biggest difference is the height the camera was at. Try shooting with the camera at about chest height, or get down on a knee. If the camera is at eye level or higher, it looks as if you’re looking down on the car, which can make it look small and insignificant. But, If you shoot from too low an angle, all you see is wheels, and the windows look tiny.
- Adjust Exposure - Most car interiors are black or very dark, which is a problem becasue modern cameras try to make everything an average brightness, and the pictures end up washed out. This is easy to fix – just use your camera’s exposure compensation control to reduce the exposure by -0.7EV or -1EV. You need to make those black parts come out as dark as nature (or your car maker) intended. If you can't change the setting in you phone or camera, you can increase the contrast and decrease the exposure in most programs (including in your phone's image editor) before posting them.
- Warts and All - If your car has faults or cosmetic defects, show them properly so buyers can judge how bad (or how minor) they are. Get close enough to show them properly, but include enough of the car, or something like a a door handle or emblem, for scale. Before taking the picture, shift your head a little this way and that to see how the reflections change – it’s these reflections that bring out the shape and size of any dents.
- Devil In the Details - If your vehicle has extra gadgets or features that increase its value, make sure you take close up pictures of each of them. It doesn’t matter if it’s something as boring as a new stereo or rims, it all helps the sale. The trick here is to get close and fill the frame with the detail you’re photographing, but not so close that it is out of focus. Don’t take an overall picture of the car and assume that viewers will be able to see every detail. Also, pack a dusting cloth in your glovebox and wipe every item before you shoot it. Something that looks clean from 12 feet away can look much difference at an arm's length.
