Taking Great Pictures

By William Bryant at 27 January, 2008, 3:45 pm

The following is a general how-to of making the most of your photo taking for your pre-owned inventory. The tips are from years of taking inventory photos on cars that I care about since they’re on my lot. If you care about how your inventory looks online, you’ll want to take this how-to as a guide for your photo taking.

First off are some dos and don’ts of online inventory photos:

Do take pictures in the shade or when it’s cloudy. You’ll make much better pictures and won’t have shadows on your interior. I do mine in the morning while the building puts off shade in the front of it.
Don’t use flash. Rarely do you need it, and with all the glass in a car, what you’ll get is a lot of reflection.
Do pull cars out of line. Don’t take pictures of cars while they’re in a line of cars.
Don’t take pictures before it comes from clean-up. This one is a duh.
Do use a high-quality digital camera. Don’t cheap on this, if you have a cheap one buy a good one, because it will pay off. Blurry images or images with bad color tones will ruin your dealership image, not just the car’s.
Don’t take pictures at night. Just don’t, you can’t see and lights aren’t good enough.
Do watermark your dealer name and phone number. I’ll give you more info on that below.
Don’t get your reflection or shadow in the picture. Sometimes it’s hard to do, but that’s why cloudy days are best for photos.
Do take pictures immediately!

These are examples of bad photos, taken by our previous professional lot service. We paid $15 per car for these photos. But these are examples of what happens when you take pictures in direct sunlight, don’t take your time making the right shot, and don’t avoid shadows. Black cars are especially bad about reflecting not only light, but as you can see the streamers are reflected. These are the type of photos you want to avoid!

Those are the basic Dos and Don’ts. Keep those in mind. Now, here’s a step by step of how I take my pictures, which is probably very similar to how other veterans do it.

First step: Pull the car out of line, preferrably somewhere shady if it’s cloudy, or with a good background. I usually park the car in front of the showroom so you see our name. No use in turning off the car. Usually, I like to tun the wheels all the way to the right so you can really see the wheels.

Step Two: Take exterior pictures. I start by taking pictures at all four corners, but as I go around I look out for something special (HEMI badge, new tires, aftermarket rims, etc.). If it’s a truck I’ll make sure to take a picture of the bed, hitch, etc.

Step Three: Take interior pictures. First picture is a side shot of the front from the driver’s door. Second shot is a side shot of the rear. Third shot is of the front interior, I try to get the whole front dash if it’s a small car. With the back door still open, I peek over the driver seat to get the dash. If it’s a truck, I’ll get one shot of the driver’s side dash and another of the passenger side dash. Get the seats in there, too, if you can. Next shot is of the rear seats from the front so you get a full view of them. This is especially important with vans and SUVs. If there’s a sunroof, take a shot of that while it’s open. It’s something often missed in pictures. Then get a shot of the center dash, accenting things like heated seats, CD changer, auto or stickshift transmission. I like to go the extra step by getting pictures of logos such as Bose, embossed logos in the seat, DVD players, etc. The more pictures you take the better.

Step Four: Engine and trunk photos. Don’t forget these, it just completes the whole car photo session. Most consumers are impressed at how clean the engine bay is, mainly because they never see the engine!

Step Five: Download photos, resize and watermark, upload. One way you can really top off the professional look of your photos is by watermarking them. The tool that I use, and very likely most other ISMs who take their own photos, is called Fast Stone Photo. It’s free (and free stuff rocks!). But it will allow you to resize your photos (Autotrader.com requires photo size of 640×480) and add your logo/phone number as you see in the pictures I took below. You can do a lot of other cool stuff, too, basically anything you would need to do with pictures. So check it out, and use it!

And you’re finished! Not that you needed to learn how to take pictures of a car, but these are some tips from someone who’s taken lots of photos (including lots of bad ones). Below is an example of a car I took pictures of recently.