Photo tips
03-18-2007 | 11:35 PM
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From: SF Peninsula
‘17 Carrera GTS, ‘16 E63 Estate, 1965 Shelby Cobra and a few more
Photo tips
Like a lot of people on this board I am always interested to see images of other people's cars. I'm disappointed when the images are poor quality, too small, or fail to show the highlights of the vehicle.
I put together some tips that I think help make for a better picture of your ride, because even great cars look bad in poor quality pictures.
1) don't use a camera phone if at all possible, even the best camera phone images are far inferior to point-and-shoot digital cameras.
2) take shots in the morning or late afternoon. I find the mid-day sunlight washes out the car and is a lot less appealing that the warmer light of the morning or afternoon.
3) don't take a picture of your car while standing up, get down to it's level and the image will always look a lot better. Same goes for taking pictures of your kids, btw.
4) the money shot is always taken diagonal to the front fender or off the rear quarter panel. Don't know why, but just look at any car magazine and this will generally hold up as truth. For whatever reason, images taken perpendicular just never look impressive. If you have a DSLR and can adjust the aperture to move the depth of field you can get some interesting shots from the hood because you can create the illusion that the car is stretched out.
5) when taking the shot diagonal to the front fender, turn the wheel away from you to get the wheel detail.
6) try to go for at least a little composition... shooting your car while it's parked at the curb in front of your house, or worse, in the parking lot of the neighborhood Wal-Mart really doesn't do it justice. Of course, what your house looks like can override this rule
7) black cars look awesome at night if you can take advantage of non-flash lighting.
8) I think 640 x 427 is the best upload size, anything smaller and the car just isn't done justice and anything bigger risks pissing people off because the image file sizes get big. You editing program may export different sizes so whatever is close, just keep the proportion to the source image when exporting.
9) speaking of uploading images, it's really better to use a photo sharing service like www.zooomr.com or www.imageshack.com and not the upload service that is available through the forum. Just insert the images into your post as static urls and they will show up inline rather than forcing people to click on the thumbnails. There should be instructions somewhere in here for doing this, it's really not difficult at all.
10) last but not least, fer christ sakes wash your car before snapping the shot that will proudly display it!
I put together some tips that I think help make for a better picture of your ride, because even great cars look bad in poor quality pictures.
1) don't use a camera phone if at all possible, even the best camera phone images are far inferior to point-and-shoot digital cameras.
2) take shots in the morning or late afternoon. I find the mid-day sunlight washes out the car and is a lot less appealing that the warmer light of the morning or afternoon.
3) don't take a picture of your car while standing up, get down to it's level and the image will always look a lot better. Same goes for taking pictures of your kids, btw.
4) the money shot is always taken diagonal to the front fender or off the rear quarter panel. Don't know why, but just look at any car magazine and this will generally hold up as truth. For whatever reason, images taken perpendicular just never look impressive. If you have a DSLR and can adjust the aperture to move the depth of field you can get some interesting shots from the hood because you can create the illusion that the car is stretched out.
5) when taking the shot diagonal to the front fender, turn the wheel away from you to get the wheel detail.
6) try to go for at least a little composition... shooting your car while it's parked at the curb in front of your house, or worse, in the parking lot of the neighborhood Wal-Mart really doesn't do it justice. Of course, what your house looks like can override this rule
7) black cars look awesome at night if you can take advantage of non-flash lighting.
8) I think 640 x 427 is the best upload size, anything smaller and the car just isn't done justice and anything bigger risks pissing people off because the image file sizes get big. You editing program may export different sizes so whatever is close, just keep the proportion to the source image when exporting.
9) speaking of uploading images, it's really better to use a photo sharing service like www.zooomr.com or www.imageshack.com and not the upload service that is available through the forum. Just insert the images into your post as static urls and they will show up inline rather than forcing people to click on the thumbnails. There should be instructions somewhere in here for doing this, it's really not difficult at all.
10) last but not least, fer christ sakes wash your car before snapping the shot that will proudly display it!
