-Curt's Manifesto on Motorcar Photography-
06-15-2002, 08:55 PM
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-Curt's Manifesto on Motorcar Photography-
-Curt's Manifesto on Motorcar Photography-
Be advised that color photography is about LIGHT. LIGHT. Not shadow, LIGHT. Unfortunately, almost 100% of the time that you're setting up to shoot your motorcar in the sunlight, the sunlight is in ALL the wrong places. On this page you'll learn how to position your car and schedule your outdoor shoot so that you'll end up with top-notch photographs... instead of birdcage-liner snapshots.
The three worst mistakes a novice makes
when photographing his/her car:
Mistake #1: Bright overhead sunlight. Not good. Harsh sunlight (and worse, the corollary harsh shadows caused by harsh sunlight) ruins more motorcar photos than anything else. Solution: wait 'til near sunset, or wait for an overcast day, and position (i.e., rotate) your car to take full advantage of that softer light.
Mistake #2: Park your car in Paducah, then back up to Baffin Bay to snap your shutter. Not good. Solution: get up close and "fill the frame" with automobile. Your objective is to photograph automobile, not real estate. If your photos come out 15% motorcar and 85% real estate... you're getting it wrong. This is especially important to keep in mind if you're using a digital camera: as many as possible of those precious pixels MUST represent your motorcar, not the surrounding real estate.
Mistake #3: Stand up and "shoot down" on your car. Not good, and for several reasons. Solution: it's covered in detail below.
If you'd like all of the following guidelines in condensed form:
Clean your car and tires thoroughly; give your tires a rubdown with Armorall.
Schedule your photo session very early or very late (just after dawn or just before dusk).
Park your car on (clean, unstriped) pavement. DO NOT photograph it parked on grass, unless it's perhaps an off-road 4x4, or if you want it to look like an abandoned vehicle.
Carefully position/rotate your car so that you've got evenly-distributed sunlight over ALL the surfaces of your car facing your camera (the grille, the "chin," the tires, the sides). The (dawn or dusk) sun should be directly behind you, warming your backside and illuminating ALL of the surfaces of your car facing the camera; once again, just to make sure you've got it: with the (very early or very late) sun at your back, shoot the SUNLIT side(s) of your car, not, repeat NOT the shadow side(s). If you're shooting, say, a typical "3/4-view" shot, then not only the side of the car, but the grille, the "chin" and the tire tread should be illuminated by the sun. Are we clear on that? Color photography is about LIGHT, NOT SHADOW. And if you're going to shoot different views of your car (rear, head-on/front, etc.), then STAY WHERE YOU ARE WITH THE SUN AT YOUR BACK and have a colleague "rotate" your car into the next desired position. Contrary to some folks' expectations, you cannot "walk around your car shooting photos" and expect the sun to follow you accordingly.
Think of it this way: your camera MUST be aimed in the direction of your (dawn or dusk) shadow. You could mount your camera onto a tripod facing in the direction of the tripod's shadow, epoxy your tripod and the camera into fixed position, then shoot all of your views of your car by doing nothing but "rotating" your car. And you'd have ideal lighting every time. One more time: photograph ONLY the sunlit side(s) of your car.
Crouch down and shoot at ± headlight level. Take some shots with your headlights or parking lights ON. The doors and decks should be closed; if you're shooting for an ad, don't include models (i.e., people) in your photos.
Use a "normal" focal-length lens, or set your zoom lens accordingly (avoid wide-angle settings except for engine, cockpit and luggage-compartment shots).
Make sure you're close enough to your car to "fill the frame" with automobile, NOT real estate.
Beware of ugly shadows and reflections on the paint surfaces (especially, avoid the chaotic shadows of shade trees!)
Use your flash (that is to say, FORCE your flash to work) for ALL engine and cockpit shots. Steering wheel straight, tilt column down, sunvisors (on roadsters) in horizontal position. Spotlessly clean carpet and upholstery. Wide-angle lens okay for these shots. Again, use your flash. In daylight/outdoor photography you cannot trust your "automatic" flash "to work automatically." In light of that reality (if you'll pardon the unintended pun), most modern cameras today have a "forced flash" feature, which on your camera's digital readout usually appears as a lightning bolt icon. Use this "forced flash" feature for your outdoor shots.
Is that simple enough? If you'd like a few more pro tips, read on...
1. Make sure your car is sparkling clean. Use Armorall (or similar rubber treatment) on the tires (hint: spray your Armorall onto your towel, not on the tire, so that overspray on the pavement won't show up in your photos). Take along a bucket of cleanup/touchup items on your photo session, for on-the-scene detailing.
2. Use a good 35mm camera and a standard (50mm) lens... or a good digital camera. Don't attempt to use a wide-angle or zoom or telephoto lens for motorcar photography. A wide angle lens produces too much "fisheye" distortion; your zoom or telephoto lens will tend to "abbreviate" your wheelbase. Use any good color negative or transparency film; we prefer Fujichrome (slide/transparency film) and Fujicolor (negative film) for most of our photography, but the brand you choose isn't particularly important; 200-ISO film is appropriate for most of your motorcar shooting. The best place (price-wise) for you to purchase Fuji film (in the U.S. and Canada) is Wal-Mart.
3. If you use a digital camera, PLEASE send us your image(s) exactly as you downloaded them from your camera... that is to say, NO EDITING, NO CROPPING, and especially NO RESAVING. We'll do that ourselves, and we need all the data on your original digital-camera image in order to achieve the best results for you.
4. For digital images you intend to keep and use for yourself, make sure that upon uploading them onto your computer, you resave them IMMEDIATELY as "TIFF" format (or ".psd" Photoshop-native format) files, before you do any editing or resaves. You see, every time you resave a "JPEG" image in an image-editing program such as Adobe Photoshop, you degrade the image (a fact that the camera makers seem to never caution folks on). You can resave your TIFF image as many times as you desire without fouling the quality. Be advised that this cautionary note refers only to RESAVES in your image-editing application; merely copying your image from one disc to another is not a problem.
If you need to use or email your final, edited image on the Internet, then make a copy of your TIFF image as a 72-ppi low- or medium-quality JPEG, and email/upload the JPEG copy. Keep your TIFF image on your hard disk as your "working original."
5. Get up close and "fill your frame" with automobile, not real estate. This tip is all-the-more important if you're using a digital camera... you can't squander those precious pixels on real estate. Folks don't need or care to see your entire county, they want to see the car you've got for sale. Repeat: Get up close! Focus on the part of your car closest to your camera, and select an f-stop of between f5.6 and f16, so that all or most of your car is in focus. And if you're going to use those photos on a website, then crop out whatever real estate that remains. You gain nothing by forcing folks to download all that unnecessary real estate when all they care to see is your car.
6. If it's bright overhead sunlight (which means you've got a harsh shadow under your car), go fishin', not photographin'. Bright midday/mid-afternoon sunlight introduces two phenomena, both undesirable, both... ugly: 1) HARSH GLARE and 2) HARSH SHADOWS. Good automobile photography demands even, soft lighting all over and around every part of your car facing your camera. You should either wait for an overcast (cloudy) day, which provides much softer and more-evenly-distributed illumination (although you should avoid getting the cloudy/overcast sky itself into your photograph), or schedule your photo session for when the sun is low (i.e., at dawn or dusk). Be sure to shoot the sunlit side(s), not the shaded side(s). Color photography is about light, not shadow! Repeat: rotate your car so that the (dawn or dusk) sun is on the camera side!! Once again, EVERY PART OF YOUR CAR facing your camera should be lit by the sun. Have you got that yet? This means that if you're shooting a "3/4 view," with mostly the side of your car but also the front end in your viewfinder, the sun should be lighting up the grille and your tire tread just as much as the side of your car.
There's one caveat: with all dawn/dusk shots, you must be careful to keep your own shadow off your car! But there are two things you can do to prevent your shadow from reaching your car: 1) get down on one knee and shoot from waist level (which you should be doing anyway), and 2) back up a little further from your car and zoom-in your lens a little more so that your viewfinder is still "filled with motorcar."
And don't position your car under a shade tree to avoid harsh sunlight; your resulting photos will leave the impression that you painted your car in a chaotic jungle camouflage scheme; indeed, you should always be on the lookout for unwanted reflections on the body (trees and buildings and road signs can produce really wretched reflections, especially on black and dark-colored cars... just take a look at the photo below). You can sometimes obtain very good results by parking in the (dawn or dusk) shade of a building, but only if there's a very bright sky overhead to provide adequate illumination. Whatever the weather or time of day, make certain that the normal "shadow areas" (e.g., the 'chin,' the grille, the tire tread) have ample light to show up in the photo; this is one area where employing your flash attachment can often help you get a significantly better photo. Position/rotate your car for optimal lighting... on the camera side of the car! If you need to shoot the other side(s) of your car, then reposition your car NOT yourself. Take some shots with the headlamps or parking lights turned on; for your rear-end shots, have someone sit in the driver's seat with his/her foot on the brakes to light up those brake lights... yet another splendid lighting effect, especially in regards to Lamborghini and Ferrari replicas.
above: Ouch! Beware of surface reflections.
If you're using a digital camera that provides separate settings for resolution and "quality," set your camera for "medium" or "high" resolution and MAXIMUM JPEG quality. Listen carefully: the term "resolution" refers ONLY to the number of pixels making up each image (640x480, for example, merely means that there are 307,200 pixels making up the image); JPEG "quality," on the other hand, has absolutely nothing to do with resolution. JPEG "quality" has to do with how much pixel-artifacting (damage) to the image you're willing to tolerate as you increase the JPEG compression to reduce filesize. Thus if your digital camera offers you separate a separate control for "quality" and "resolution," you can set your camera for, say, maximum-quality/low resolution images (perfect for the Internet), or conversely you can even set it for wretched-quality high-resolution images. If your camera does not provide separate settings for "quality" and "resolution," but only simplified settings that read something like "Standard, High and Super High Quality" (or perhaps "small filesize, medium filesize, large filesize"), this means that each setting represents some fixed blend of JPEG compression and resolution. In this case you should select "Super High Quality" or "large filesize" (or whatever operative naming scheme is employed by your camera) for your motorcar shots. If you're going to send us those maximum quality/medium or high-resolution images to be used in an article or a "For Sale" ad, we'll have the maximum amount of image data to work with, and we'll "sample them down" (i.e., size them down) appropriately for viewing on the Web.
******************************
pro tips for (OUCH!) mid-day/harsh sunlight photography:
1: use your flash
2: use a lens shade
3: use a polarizer filter
7. If for some obscure reason you MUST shoot in bright sunlight (at an outdoor carshow, for example), force your flash to work "force-fill" light into those dark shadows caused by harsh sunlight. Any good 35mm or digital camera will permit you to "force" your flash to work in bright sunlight.
Pro photographers routinely use "fill flash" for their daytime shots, although I couldn't count the times someone at a race or carshow has asked me "Why are you using that big flash unit with all this bright sunshine?" Read my lips: the brighter the overhead sunlight, the more you need to employ "fill flash." Repeat: bright sunlight means USE YOUR FLASH (and if your camera has "automatic" flash, then set it to force/fill flash, so that the bright sunlight won't prevent the flash from working)!
You're unlikely to get good photographs in midday sunlight without 1) a lens shade, and 2) a good strobe flash attachment. Period. The lens shade will help keep the sun off your lens, and the flash unit will serve to both lighten the shadows and reduce the intensity of the brightness in the glare areas.
8. Get a polarizer lens filter ($25*$35); use it to greatly reduce the glare (and thus lighten the shadows) in your midday & mid-afternoon shots. You'll find that same polarizer filter to be worth its weight in Krugerrands for your vacation shots as well, especially your beach and ski shots, where your photographs will take a quantum leap in richness of color. But there are a few caveats: occasionally a polarizer filter will over-emphasize the contrast, especially with yellow cars.
Again, avoid at all costs photographing your car in bright overhead or mid-afternoon sunlight.
******************************
9. Make sure that the backdrop is neat and appropriate. A fashionable restaurant or hotel or downtown plaza or fountain or a college campus scene or a '50s-styled drive-in restaurant or even a beach or wharf scene can make an ideal backdrop. Make sure there is no signpost or tree "growing out of" the top of your car or a parking-lot line jutting from a tire. Make sure the steering wheel is straight (and on a Cobra or other roadster, the sunvisors should be turned down to horizontal). Keep your car on clean, unlined/uncracked pavement and off the grass; a motorcar photographed on grass or tree leaves tends to look like an abandoned vehicle. Above all, remember that it's your car that's the primary focal point of your photograph, not the background or the live models.
10. Take your photos from different angles and different camera heights, from ± headlight level. Amateurs tend to "stand up and shoot down" on their car. Not good. The most dramatic, even menacing, sportscar shots are low-angle and (relatively) close-up. Position yourself for 3/4 view, 3-dimensional shots that capture part of the front and more of the side. If you intend your photos to be used on the Internet, also shoot a few "broadside" shots; a broadside shot (with the decks and doors closed) enables you to display your car on the Internet at a larger physical size while the filesize remains relatively small, which means a bigger image/faster download for each person viewing your car. If you really want to get serious, mount your camera onto a tripod (adjusted down low) so that you can critically examine and adjust the composition of each shot.
11. If your camera offers you the option of imprinting the date/time onto your film or digital image... for cryin' out loud, turn this brilliant "feature" off when photographing your car.
Engine & cockpit shots
Use your flash. Repeat: use your flash. One more time: USE YOUR FLASH! For cockpit shots, make sure the upholstery and carpet is vacuumed to spotless. Straighten the steering wheel; if it's a tilt wheel, tilt it down to driving position. If your car is a Cobra or other roadster, adjust the visors and harnesses and windwings. You can use your wide-angle lens for engine and cockpit shots.
Photo scan on flatbed scanner vs.
35mm negative scan on a film scanner
images above hotlinked to scan comparison page
You may have already noticed that we urge you to send us your (35mm film) negative strips along with your photo prints, so that we can achieve the best scan possible. If you'd like to witness firsthand what an astonishing difference a good film scanner makes, check this hotlinked scan-comparison page.
If you're taking photos of your car to put it up for sale: good photographs represent your most important step in effectively marketing, rather than merely advertising, your car (or your kit car/Cobra/streetrod lineup) for sale. Similarly, if you plan to submit a photo of your car to the editor of a magazine, the odds of its being published are increased a hundredfold if you submit a professional-caliber photograph or digital image; also, bear in mind that magazines invariably prefer a color transparency (a "slide") over a color print.
Take advantage of the fact that most folks take really bad photographs of their motorcar--and then give yourself a big competitive edge by applying what you've learned on this web page and presenting your motorcar in (ahem) its best light.
More digital camera information
If you're shopping for a digital camera, bear in mind that both Nikon (http://www.nikon.com), with its 900-series) and Olympus (http://www.olympus.com), with an extensive model lineup, offer perhaps the best overall quality images for the dollar (or Pound Sterling or Deutschmark...). Epson (http://www.epson.com) also offers a good bit of bang for the buck with several of its models.
I'm not impressed with the Sony Mavica lineup; the only way you're going to get acceptable-quality images on a consumer-grade Mavica is to shoot at the very highest-quality setting. I think the root of the Mavica's shortcomings is that Sony chose to fit a 3.5" floppy drive into the camera body... not a sterling idea (heavy weight, excessive battery drain, low-capacity storage)... then, due to the tiny amount of storage capacity on a floppy disk (1.4 megabytes vs. up to 512 Mb on a Compact Flash card that's only 3mm thick and the size of a match flap, or 128 Mb on a SmartMedia card the size AND thickness of a match flap), Sony was forced to ultra-compress each image in order to get several images to fit on that low-capacity floppy. That high compression results in very noticeable "artifacts" in the image. Further, the optics on the lower-end Mavicas tend to produce brownish "halos" along areas of high contrast that prove to be quite challenging to edit away with Photoshop. But all is not lost: once again, if you shoot only at the maximum quality mode, you'll still come out okay.
Great Resources for Digital Cameras and Accessories
Great information site: A marvelous website for you to check out is http://www.steves-digicams.com, which arms you with a wealth of information and product reviews about digital cameras ("digicams") and related accessories. Make sure you check out the "camera reviews" page.
Storage: SmartMedia and CompactFlash memory cards: Check out http://www.newegg.com. Their prices on storage cards are among the best. (If you stumble across similar or better prices, let me know!)
NiMH batteries: I receive a lot of questions about digital cameras and related topics; you see, I added an Olympus D600L digital picture-taker to my grab-bag of Nikon equipment in 1998 (in 2001 I upgraded to Olympus's top-end E-10 professional digicam. In any event, here's some hot news for you: you can obtain those splendid AA Nickel-Metal-Hydride batteries (which cost as much as $5 apiece just about anywhere else), at the website http://NiMHbattery.com/maha-aa-t.htm There's also lots of entertaining and useful information about batteries in general. The price is a no-brainer: for AA batteries, beginning at about $2.10 USD each, then goes down from there in quantity. Good stuff. And their NiMH battery charger (the battery-conditioning model# MH-C204F-DC, at $24.90 USD is a runaway best value; it's full-featured and very compact in size.
For the record, "conditioning" a NiMH battery means to "drain it down to minimal charge," and according to expert advisories is important to do occasionally to maintain your NiMH batteries in peak operating condition. Thus having a "drain/condition" feature on your NiMH charger (and, of course, using the feature periodically) should ensure both better performance and a longer life for your NiMH batteries.
Just recently (mid-January 2002) been advised that (North American) retailers "Costco" and "Sam's" also offer low prices on these premium batteries, to wit:
"Curt: Thanks for some great camera tips; I read your recommendation on the AA NiMH batteries with interest because I recently bought some at Sam's at a super deal. Sam's had a package of 8-AA energizers in 1700 mah NiMH with a companion charger that charges NiMH or NiCad at the flip of a switch. The total package is $19.95. I don't know how they do it.. All the Birmingham Sam's offered this deal, and I bought several for friends who don't get into town often."
Huel Young
Pell City, Alabama
Return me to the Cobras For Sale by Owner page
Return me to Cobra Country's Classified Ad Rates page
Return me to Cobra Country home page
Return me to Mustang Country home page
Return me to StreetRod Country home page
visitation odometer for Motorcar Photography Tips
beginning 30 April 2001
http://www.cobracountry.com/fototips
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Exception: permission is herewith granted to motorcar clubs and photography clubs to reprint this article for their members in (or as a printed supplement to) their club newsletters, so long as the above copyright notice is included in entirety.
v.5.3 of "Motorcar Photography Tips" by Curt Scott
Be advised that color photography is about LIGHT. LIGHT. Not shadow, LIGHT. Unfortunately, almost 100% of the time that you're setting up to shoot your motorcar in the sunlight, the sunlight is in ALL the wrong places. On this page you'll learn how to position your car and schedule your outdoor shoot so that you'll end up with top-notch photographs... instead of birdcage-liner snapshots.
The three worst mistakes a novice makes
when photographing his/her car:
Mistake #1: Bright overhead sunlight. Not good. Harsh sunlight (and worse, the corollary harsh shadows caused by harsh sunlight) ruins more motorcar photos than anything else. Solution: wait 'til near sunset, or wait for an overcast day, and position (i.e., rotate) your car to take full advantage of that softer light.
Mistake #2: Park your car in Paducah, then back up to Baffin Bay to snap your shutter. Not good. Solution: get up close and "fill the frame" with automobile. Your objective is to photograph automobile, not real estate. If your photos come out 15% motorcar and 85% real estate... you're getting it wrong. This is especially important to keep in mind if you're using a digital camera: as many as possible of those precious pixels MUST represent your motorcar, not the surrounding real estate.
Mistake #3: Stand up and "shoot down" on your car. Not good, and for several reasons. Solution: it's covered in detail below.
If you'd like all of the following guidelines in condensed form:
Clean your car and tires thoroughly; give your tires a rubdown with Armorall.
Schedule your photo session very early or very late (just after dawn or just before dusk).
Park your car on (clean, unstriped) pavement. DO NOT photograph it parked on grass, unless it's perhaps an off-road 4x4, or if you want it to look like an abandoned vehicle.
Carefully position/rotate your car so that you've got evenly-distributed sunlight over ALL the surfaces of your car facing your camera (the grille, the "chin," the tires, the sides). The (dawn or dusk) sun should be directly behind you, warming your backside and illuminating ALL of the surfaces of your car facing the camera; once again, just to make sure you've got it: with the (very early or very late) sun at your back, shoot the SUNLIT side(s) of your car, not, repeat NOT the shadow side(s). If you're shooting, say, a typical "3/4-view" shot, then not only the side of the car, but the grille, the "chin" and the tire tread should be illuminated by the sun. Are we clear on that? Color photography is about LIGHT, NOT SHADOW. And if you're going to shoot different views of your car (rear, head-on/front, etc.), then STAY WHERE YOU ARE WITH THE SUN AT YOUR BACK and have a colleague "rotate" your car into the next desired position. Contrary to some folks' expectations, you cannot "walk around your car shooting photos" and expect the sun to follow you accordingly.
Think of it this way: your camera MUST be aimed in the direction of your (dawn or dusk) shadow. You could mount your camera onto a tripod facing in the direction of the tripod's shadow, epoxy your tripod and the camera into fixed position, then shoot all of your views of your car by doing nothing but "rotating" your car. And you'd have ideal lighting every time. One more time: photograph ONLY the sunlit side(s) of your car.
Crouch down and shoot at ± headlight level. Take some shots with your headlights or parking lights ON. The doors and decks should be closed; if you're shooting for an ad, don't include models (i.e., people) in your photos.
Use a "normal" focal-length lens, or set your zoom lens accordingly (avoid wide-angle settings except for engine, cockpit and luggage-compartment shots).
Make sure you're close enough to your car to "fill the frame" with automobile, NOT real estate.
Beware of ugly shadows and reflections on the paint surfaces (especially, avoid the chaotic shadows of shade trees!)
Use your flash (that is to say, FORCE your flash to work) for ALL engine and cockpit shots. Steering wheel straight, tilt column down, sunvisors (on roadsters) in horizontal position. Spotlessly clean carpet and upholstery. Wide-angle lens okay for these shots. Again, use your flash. In daylight/outdoor photography you cannot trust your "automatic" flash "to work automatically." In light of that reality (if you'll pardon the unintended pun), most modern cameras today have a "forced flash" feature, which on your camera's digital readout usually appears as a lightning bolt icon. Use this "forced flash" feature for your outdoor shots.
Is that simple enough? If you'd like a few more pro tips, read on...
1. Make sure your car is sparkling clean. Use Armorall (or similar rubber treatment) on the tires (hint: spray your Armorall onto your towel, not on the tire, so that overspray on the pavement won't show up in your photos). Take along a bucket of cleanup/touchup items on your photo session, for on-the-scene detailing.
2. Use a good 35mm camera and a standard (50mm) lens... or a good digital camera. Don't attempt to use a wide-angle or zoom or telephoto lens for motorcar photography. A wide angle lens produces too much "fisheye" distortion; your zoom or telephoto lens will tend to "abbreviate" your wheelbase. Use any good color negative or transparency film; we prefer Fujichrome (slide/transparency film) and Fujicolor (negative film) for most of our photography, but the brand you choose isn't particularly important; 200-ISO film is appropriate for most of your motorcar shooting. The best place (price-wise) for you to purchase Fuji film (in the U.S. and Canada) is Wal-Mart.
3. If you use a digital camera, PLEASE send us your image(s) exactly as you downloaded them from your camera... that is to say, NO EDITING, NO CROPPING, and especially NO RESAVING. We'll do that ourselves, and we need all the data on your original digital-camera image in order to achieve the best results for you.
4. For digital images you intend to keep and use for yourself, make sure that upon uploading them onto your computer, you resave them IMMEDIATELY as "TIFF" format (or ".psd" Photoshop-native format) files, before you do any editing or resaves. You see, every time you resave a "JPEG" image in an image-editing program such as Adobe Photoshop, you degrade the image (a fact that the camera makers seem to never caution folks on). You can resave your TIFF image as many times as you desire without fouling the quality. Be advised that this cautionary note refers only to RESAVES in your image-editing application; merely copying your image from one disc to another is not a problem.
If you need to use or email your final, edited image on the Internet, then make a copy of your TIFF image as a 72-ppi low- or medium-quality JPEG, and email/upload the JPEG copy. Keep your TIFF image on your hard disk as your "working original."
5. Get up close and "fill your frame" with automobile, not real estate. This tip is all-the-more important if you're using a digital camera... you can't squander those precious pixels on real estate. Folks don't need or care to see your entire county, they want to see the car you've got for sale. Repeat: Get up close! Focus on the part of your car closest to your camera, and select an f-stop of between f5.6 and f16, so that all or most of your car is in focus. And if you're going to use those photos on a website, then crop out whatever real estate that remains. You gain nothing by forcing folks to download all that unnecessary real estate when all they care to see is your car.
6. If it's bright overhead sunlight (which means you've got a harsh shadow under your car), go fishin', not photographin'. Bright midday/mid-afternoon sunlight introduces two phenomena, both undesirable, both... ugly: 1) HARSH GLARE and 2) HARSH SHADOWS. Good automobile photography demands even, soft lighting all over and around every part of your car facing your camera. You should either wait for an overcast (cloudy) day, which provides much softer and more-evenly-distributed illumination (although you should avoid getting the cloudy/overcast sky itself into your photograph), or schedule your photo session for when the sun is low (i.e., at dawn or dusk). Be sure to shoot the sunlit side(s), not the shaded side(s). Color photography is about light, not shadow! Repeat: rotate your car so that the (dawn or dusk) sun is on the camera side!! Once again, EVERY PART OF YOUR CAR facing your camera should be lit by the sun. Have you got that yet? This means that if you're shooting a "3/4 view," with mostly the side of your car but also the front end in your viewfinder, the sun should be lighting up the grille and your tire tread just as much as the side of your car.
There's one caveat: with all dawn/dusk shots, you must be careful to keep your own shadow off your car! But there are two things you can do to prevent your shadow from reaching your car: 1) get down on one knee and shoot from waist level (which you should be doing anyway), and 2) back up a little further from your car and zoom-in your lens a little more so that your viewfinder is still "filled with motorcar."
And don't position your car under a shade tree to avoid harsh sunlight; your resulting photos will leave the impression that you painted your car in a chaotic jungle camouflage scheme; indeed, you should always be on the lookout for unwanted reflections on the body (trees and buildings and road signs can produce really wretched reflections, especially on black and dark-colored cars... just take a look at the photo below). You can sometimes obtain very good results by parking in the (dawn or dusk) shade of a building, but only if there's a very bright sky overhead to provide adequate illumination. Whatever the weather or time of day, make certain that the normal "shadow areas" (e.g., the 'chin,' the grille, the tire tread) have ample light to show up in the photo; this is one area where employing your flash attachment can often help you get a significantly better photo. Position/rotate your car for optimal lighting... on the camera side of the car! If you need to shoot the other side(s) of your car, then reposition your car NOT yourself. Take some shots with the headlamps or parking lights turned on; for your rear-end shots, have someone sit in the driver's seat with his/her foot on the brakes to light up those brake lights... yet another splendid lighting effect, especially in regards to Lamborghini and Ferrari replicas.
above: Ouch! Beware of surface reflections.
If you're using a digital camera that provides separate settings for resolution and "quality," set your camera for "medium" or "high" resolution and MAXIMUM JPEG quality. Listen carefully: the term "resolution" refers ONLY to the number of pixels making up each image (640x480, for example, merely means that there are 307,200 pixels making up the image); JPEG "quality," on the other hand, has absolutely nothing to do with resolution. JPEG "quality" has to do with how much pixel-artifacting (damage) to the image you're willing to tolerate as you increase the JPEG compression to reduce filesize. Thus if your digital camera offers you separate a separate control for "quality" and "resolution," you can set your camera for, say, maximum-quality/low resolution images (perfect for the Internet), or conversely you can even set it for wretched-quality high-resolution images. If your camera does not provide separate settings for "quality" and "resolution," but only simplified settings that read something like "Standard, High and Super High Quality" (or perhaps "small filesize, medium filesize, large filesize"), this means that each setting represents some fixed blend of JPEG compression and resolution. In this case you should select "Super High Quality" or "large filesize" (or whatever operative naming scheme is employed by your camera) for your motorcar shots. If you're going to send us those maximum quality/medium or high-resolution images to be used in an article or a "For Sale" ad, we'll have the maximum amount of image data to work with, and we'll "sample them down" (i.e., size them down) appropriately for viewing on the Web.
******************************
pro tips for (OUCH!) mid-day/harsh sunlight photography:
1: use your flash
2: use a lens shade
3: use a polarizer filter
7. If for some obscure reason you MUST shoot in bright sunlight (at an outdoor carshow, for example), force your flash to work "force-fill" light into those dark shadows caused by harsh sunlight. Any good 35mm or digital camera will permit you to "force" your flash to work in bright sunlight.
Pro photographers routinely use "fill flash" for their daytime shots, although I couldn't count the times someone at a race or carshow has asked me "Why are you using that big flash unit with all this bright sunshine?" Read my lips: the brighter the overhead sunlight, the more you need to employ "fill flash." Repeat: bright sunlight means USE YOUR FLASH (and if your camera has "automatic" flash, then set it to force/fill flash, so that the bright sunlight won't prevent the flash from working)!
You're unlikely to get good photographs in midday sunlight without 1) a lens shade, and 2) a good strobe flash attachment. Period. The lens shade will help keep the sun off your lens, and the flash unit will serve to both lighten the shadows and reduce the intensity of the brightness in the glare areas.
8. Get a polarizer lens filter ($25*$35); use it to greatly reduce the glare (and thus lighten the shadows) in your midday & mid-afternoon shots. You'll find that same polarizer filter to be worth its weight in Krugerrands for your vacation shots as well, especially your beach and ski shots, where your photographs will take a quantum leap in richness of color. But there are a few caveats: occasionally a polarizer filter will over-emphasize the contrast, especially with yellow cars.
Again, avoid at all costs photographing your car in bright overhead or mid-afternoon sunlight.
******************************
9. Make sure that the backdrop is neat and appropriate. A fashionable restaurant or hotel or downtown plaza or fountain or a college campus scene or a '50s-styled drive-in restaurant or even a beach or wharf scene can make an ideal backdrop. Make sure there is no signpost or tree "growing out of" the top of your car or a parking-lot line jutting from a tire. Make sure the steering wheel is straight (and on a Cobra or other roadster, the sunvisors should be turned down to horizontal). Keep your car on clean, unlined/uncracked pavement and off the grass; a motorcar photographed on grass or tree leaves tends to look like an abandoned vehicle. Above all, remember that it's your car that's the primary focal point of your photograph, not the background or the live models.
10. Take your photos from different angles and different camera heights, from ± headlight level. Amateurs tend to "stand up and shoot down" on their car. Not good. The most dramatic, even menacing, sportscar shots are low-angle and (relatively) close-up. Position yourself for 3/4 view, 3-dimensional shots that capture part of the front and more of the side. If you intend your photos to be used on the Internet, also shoot a few "broadside" shots; a broadside shot (with the decks and doors closed) enables you to display your car on the Internet at a larger physical size while the filesize remains relatively small, which means a bigger image/faster download for each person viewing your car. If you really want to get serious, mount your camera onto a tripod (adjusted down low) so that you can critically examine and adjust the composition of each shot.
11. If your camera offers you the option of imprinting the date/time onto your film or digital image... for cryin' out loud, turn this brilliant "feature" off when photographing your car.
Engine & cockpit shots
Use your flash. Repeat: use your flash. One more time: USE YOUR FLASH! For cockpit shots, make sure the upholstery and carpet is vacuumed to spotless. Straighten the steering wheel; if it's a tilt wheel, tilt it down to driving position. If your car is a Cobra or other roadster, adjust the visors and harnesses and windwings. You can use your wide-angle lens for engine and cockpit shots.
Photo scan on flatbed scanner vs.
35mm negative scan on a film scanner
images above hotlinked to scan comparison page
You may have already noticed that we urge you to send us your (35mm film) negative strips along with your photo prints, so that we can achieve the best scan possible. If you'd like to witness firsthand what an astonishing difference a good film scanner makes, check this hotlinked scan-comparison page.
If you're taking photos of your car to put it up for sale: good photographs represent your most important step in effectively marketing, rather than merely advertising, your car (or your kit car/Cobra/streetrod lineup) for sale. Similarly, if you plan to submit a photo of your car to the editor of a magazine, the odds of its being published are increased a hundredfold if you submit a professional-caliber photograph or digital image; also, bear in mind that magazines invariably prefer a color transparency (a "slide") over a color print.
Take advantage of the fact that most folks take really bad photographs of their motorcar--and then give yourself a big competitive edge by applying what you've learned on this web page and presenting your motorcar in (ahem) its best light.
More digital camera information
If you're shopping for a digital camera, bear in mind that both Nikon (http://www.nikon.com), with its 900-series) and Olympus (http://www.olympus.com), with an extensive model lineup, offer perhaps the best overall quality images for the dollar (or Pound Sterling or Deutschmark...). Epson (http://www.epson.com) also offers a good bit of bang for the buck with several of its models.
I'm not impressed with the Sony Mavica lineup; the only way you're going to get acceptable-quality images on a consumer-grade Mavica is to shoot at the very highest-quality setting. I think the root of the Mavica's shortcomings is that Sony chose to fit a 3.5" floppy drive into the camera body... not a sterling idea (heavy weight, excessive battery drain, low-capacity storage)... then, due to the tiny amount of storage capacity on a floppy disk (1.4 megabytes vs. up to 512 Mb on a Compact Flash card that's only 3mm thick and the size of a match flap, or 128 Mb on a SmartMedia card the size AND thickness of a match flap), Sony was forced to ultra-compress each image in order to get several images to fit on that low-capacity floppy. That high compression results in very noticeable "artifacts" in the image. Further, the optics on the lower-end Mavicas tend to produce brownish "halos" along areas of high contrast that prove to be quite challenging to edit away with Photoshop. But all is not lost: once again, if you shoot only at the maximum quality mode, you'll still come out okay.
Great Resources for Digital Cameras and Accessories
Great information site: A marvelous website for you to check out is http://www.steves-digicams.com, which arms you with a wealth of information and product reviews about digital cameras ("digicams") and related accessories. Make sure you check out the "camera reviews" page.
Storage: SmartMedia and CompactFlash memory cards: Check out http://www.newegg.com. Their prices on storage cards are among the best. (If you stumble across similar or better prices, let me know!)
NiMH batteries: I receive a lot of questions about digital cameras and related topics; you see, I added an Olympus D600L digital picture-taker to my grab-bag of Nikon equipment in 1998 (in 2001 I upgraded to Olympus's top-end E-10 professional digicam. In any event, here's some hot news for you: you can obtain those splendid AA Nickel-Metal-Hydride batteries (which cost as much as $5 apiece just about anywhere else), at the website http://NiMHbattery.com/maha-aa-t.htm There's also lots of entertaining and useful information about batteries in general. The price is a no-brainer: for AA batteries, beginning at about $2.10 USD each, then goes down from there in quantity. Good stuff. And their NiMH battery charger (the battery-conditioning model# MH-C204F-DC, at $24.90 USD is a runaway best value; it's full-featured and very compact in size.
For the record, "conditioning" a NiMH battery means to "drain it down to minimal charge," and according to expert advisories is important to do occasionally to maintain your NiMH batteries in peak operating condition. Thus having a "drain/condition" feature on your NiMH charger (and, of course, using the feature periodically) should ensure both better performance and a longer life for your NiMH batteries.
Just recently (mid-January 2002) been advised that (North American) retailers "Costco" and "Sam's" also offer low prices on these premium batteries, to wit:
"Curt: Thanks for some great camera tips; I read your recommendation on the AA NiMH batteries with interest because I recently bought some at Sam's at a super deal. Sam's had a package of 8-AA energizers in 1700 mah NiMH with a companion charger that charges NiMH or NiCad at the flip of a switch. The total package is $19.95. I don't know how they do it.. All the Birmingham Sam's offered this deal, and I bought several for friends who don't get into town often."
Huel Young
Pell City, Alabama
Return me to the Cobras For Sale by Owner page
Return me to Cobra Country's Classified Ad Rates page
Return me to Cobra Country home page
Return me to Mustang Country home page
Return me to StreetRod Country home page
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beginning 30 April 2001
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v.5.3 of "Motorcar Photography Tips" by Curt Scott
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