![\"Iran](\"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/Iran-Camaro.jpg\")
Shahab Anisi photo is a rare case of a \u201cposed\u201d in-motion image. The car is in full sunlight, but in this case the sun glare helps animate the scene.<\/em><\/p>\nIt’s almost always best to zoom in as closely as you can, so the car nearly fills the frame or screen; put a little space around the front, back, top, and bottom, but not too much. You’re photographing the car, not the street with some car. Likewise, make sure you do get the entire car in; few people like photos of 90% of a car, leaving out the rear bumper. Also, while some are fascinated by wheels, headlights, etc., you will still need overview shots.<\/p>\n
Every car has a best angle, and you don’t really know what it is still you empty the camera onto your computer or view it from home, so keep taking pictures from all sorts of different angles. (This is especially important for sales ads, because otherwise customer will assume there’s a dent in the part they can’t see). You never know which will be best. Film is cheap when it’s made of bits and bytes! \u00a0Usually, the front 3\/4 is best. I tend to use my knees a lot, taking photos from worm\u2019s-eye, hip-level, and eye-level at each major angle, especially the front. I also like leaving the parking lights on, on most cars, though usually I do some with and some without. For head-on, I do it with headlights on, too. Just be careful not to damage your camera or eyes if you do this.<\/p>\n
Polarizing filters are cheap and you can even get them for iPhones and such; they are helpful for turning the windows either black or clear, killing reflections. These can do wonders whether you have control of the scene or not.<\/p>\n
If you own (or at least have control of) the car<\/h2>\n
First, if you actually own<\/em> the car, get it away from any trees or telephone poles. There are two key rules: it should not look as though something is growing out of the car, and the metalwork and windows should not be full of strange shadows.<\/p>\n Second, actually move the car around as you take photos, so you get the ideal background in each shot. Check the light conditions and make sure you’re not getting either blinding light or dark shadow. Usually, the sun should be behind the car and above you. Your best friend is a bright, cloudy day to diffuse the sunlight without destroying any colors. A dark, dismal day will hurt the look of the colors, while direct sunlight can drive contrast too high and cause blinding reflections (though sometimes, especially if you have a star filter or cross-hatch filter, some blinding reflections off the chrome can be nice).\u00a0The entire car should be in the same kind of light; having part of it in shadow will bring problems.<\/p>\n Keep your flash unit off, whether you have a phone or a camera; flash photography is rarely as desirable as ordinary photography.<\/p>\n For the interior, you may need to drive the car under some shade on a particularly sunny day. Some people actually drape a translucent material, like a thin cloth (think sheets) or light paper, over the windows to avoid shadows; this is a lot easier than moving the car around until you have perfectly uniform shade. Or you can wait until exactly the right time of day, which doesn’t last long. Or park under a particularly uniformly bushy try (good luck with that).<\/p>\n Make sure you get a few general shots of the full dash, the seat and dash, etc. The most important thing to remember about interior photography is to\u00a0get rid of anything that isn\u2019t part of the car.<\/em> Vacuum the carpets if you can; if you\u2019re at a car show and it\u2019s someone else\u2019s car, and they\u2019re letting you take unusually intensive photos, you can ask if you or they can temporarily take down the fuzzy dice and such.<\/p>\n While we’re inside, this might seem obvious, but put the key into the Run position. You don’t have to keep the engine running, but the ignition should be on so the displays all light up. This is sometimes, but not often, true for older cars as well as new ones.<\/p>\n Get the full engine bay and the engine from either side; I use a stepladder for this, because otherwise the angle\u2019s a problem. You need a taller ladder for trucks. For engine shots, try to have the car completely in the shade. If you have a phone, you can try a selfie stick. The more distance, the less distortion.<\/p>\n I mentioned the background earlier, but it\u2019s worth saying again: the ideal is a background which is attractive, uncomplicated, and in character for the car. A Jeep in a muddy or snow-covered field, or a giant puddle; a Camaro at the track; a truck in front of a huge heap of landscaping material; an old Cadillac in front of a weathered brick wall. The goal is for the background to stay out of the way of the car. You may want to photograph the same car in several places while you have it. Check out the back of box stores, municipal dumps, back roads, commuter lots, mall parking decks… a uniform background is ideal. Of course, if you live near the wilderness, a grassy field or the top of a hill are even better.<\/p>\n Incidentally, if you are photographing people with the car, position them carefully. Most people are shown up front, which means there’s a large gap from their head to the roof (unless the car is very tall). In the photo above, Shahab Anisi worked around that by using a low angle and positioning people around the middle of the car.<\/p>\n You can\u2019t choose very easily when you\u2019re taking a photo of a car on the street or driving by. However, there are some things you can do to make them look better.<\/p>\n If the car is in motion, your main priority is to stay alive, so rather than focusing on angles and daylight, think mainly about framing the car properly. Get the extreme ends of the car in the screen or frame, with just a little extra, and things will usually come out better. Not having too much background will help you clean things up later.<\/p>\n When you send a photo from your phone (or for that matter, from your computer), the email system may automatically downscale it \u2014 and it might go too far! \u00a0On an iPhone, a popup will ask how small you want the photo. Something around one megabyte (1 MB) is usually good enough but not too large. Stay over 300KB if you can, and under 3 MB (or it might never reach its destination).<\/p>\n From a Mac, after you attach an image to an email, a box named “Image Size” shows up on the right side, underneath the gray lock and below the “From” line. Choose one of these wisely; Actual Size might be way too large, but Small is probably not enough. If you look to the left of the Image Size dropdown, all the way on the left, there is a note marked \u201cMessage Size\u201d \u2014 follow the same rules, somewhere from 300KB to around 2 MB, the higher the better.<\/p>\n Even if a publication is going to use a 700 pixel wide image, incidentally, you should send something larger, e.g. 1200 pixels wide, so they can make any adjustments they need and perhaps crop the image a bit.<\/p>\n Photoshop has been used to touch up photos, it\u2019s now a verb \u2014 \u201cPhotoshopping.\u201d But you don\u2019t need an expensive Adobe subscription to do it; there are numerous inexpensive programs that are quite good for this, such as Pixelmator, Acorn, and GIMP (the latter is free but somewhat hard to use, not that Photoshop isn\u2019t).<\/p>\n Touchup is mainly ideal for times when you didn’t have perfect conditions, including when you didn’t notice that blob of bird poop on the hood. It’s a moment’s time to circle it and have the computer automatically replace it with a realistic looking artificially generated patch of surface.<\/p>\n Unless you shot on a particularly dismal day, don\u2019t increase the saturation, brightness, or contrast much; keep it looking real (I like to have the car visible in my window so I keep the color accurate). It helps to calibrate your computer monitor first. Sometimes a little sharpening is good, sometimes a little soft focus, but have restraint. I will admit to sometimes removing telephone poles or people, but it\u2019s time-consuming.<\/p>\n Crop the image to get rid of unnecessary background, but make sure you have at least a little background around every part of the car. Save in a format that doesn’t lose too much detail, such as TIFF (compressed), Digital Negative, or JPEG 2000 Lossless. (Don\u2019t use GIF or WMF.)<\/p>\n Keep the original files as well as the ones you\u2019ve doctored. A service like Dropbox comes in very handy, since it has version control. After a while, transition your images to a long-term storage area. Make sure the file or folder names will help you to find them later! Renaming batches of files is incredibly easy; so is renaming a folder. Organizing your images into well named folders will save you countless hours later. Also, make sure everything is backed up, both onto a spare hard drive that isn’t connected to your computer (and preferably is kept off-site, in case of fire or theft)\u00a0and <\/em>to some cloud backup system. I use Arq for this, saving to Backblaze\u2019s mass storage system.<\/p>\n When you want to send the photos to someone else, it’s generally best to save a copy that\u2019s smaller. If you’re posting something to the web, the maximum width is usually something like 900 pixels; at Autobison, we standardized on 707, for no particular reason. The goal was to have them look nice on a computer or phone, but not take too much time to download. It’s easy to do this from a photo editing system; from GraphicConverter, select Save As For Web and it’ll ask how wide you want the photo. Photoshop does the same using the same command, or you can resize it first and then save as. Pixelmator wants you to resize first, then select Export For Web \u2014 but change the format from PNG, unless you are a file-format religious freak, to JPG, and click the little down-arrow so you can choose the quality.<\/p>\n That brings up JPEG quality. The original should be saved at a very high level, preferably lossless. When you share it for the web, though, a JPEG quality of 60 is usually enough, unless the image has a lot of red, in which case it’ll have to be higher.<\/p>\n If you don’t have an image editor, you can still make a smaller copy \u2014 but keep the original photo! Don\u2019t overwrite it.<\/span><\/p>\n First, if you have a Mac, open the image in\u00a0Preview, which comes with every computer; you can drag the photo onto Preview in the Dock, or open Preview and then open the image from the File menu. If you double-click on the image you might be taken to Photos, which will also let you scale it.<\/p>\n In Preview, show the Tools menu and select Adjust Size. Put in the width you want, such as ten inches, and a 72 dpi resolution. Say OK and, under the File menu, select Duplicate and then Save; you should usually use JPG or JPEG-2000 format. Open the image you just saved and make sure the quality is good.<\/p>\n If you use Windows 10, right click on the image file and select \u201cedit;\u201d then find the resize tool in the ribbon and click on it. Select the width in pixels, e.g. 707. Again, save as JPEG\/JPG or JPEG 2000.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Save the file as a JPEG (JPG) (or, for line drawings, GIF) to a location you can find again. Remember to keep the original photo its original size so you will have the larger photo for future purposes. Windows will usually save the photo at a very high quality level, taking up twice as much space as it needs to; but you can get a free photo program such as GIMP to have full control, and commercial software is available at sane prices.<\/p>\n Thanks to Shahab Anisi for the photos, which come from his review of two Camaros<\/a> and a Mercedes<\/a>. Shahab was not involved in the writing of this piece.<\/em><\/p>\n Every now and then, car enthusiasts want to photograph something, whether it\u2019s for everyday carspotting, a club magazine, a sales ad, or just their own collection. As a car writer-photographer, I can provide some tips for you. Carspotting and cars that you own have some rather different rules, so I’ve split them up. Universal rules […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":857,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/blue-iranian-camaro.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1538"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1538"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1538\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1549,"href":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1538\/revisions\/1549"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/mercedes.jpg\")
This is a fine photo (by Shahab Anisi), but imagine how good it would be without the shadows; sometimes, though, the background makes a few shadows inevitable and acceptable.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/stock-dashboard-LT.jpg\")
Shahab Anisi photo; we actually cropped this so the gauges would be legible.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/group.jpg\")
<\/p>\nCarspotting<\/h2>\n
If you’re sending a photo straight from your phone<\/h2>\n
After you\u2019ve gone home<\/h2>\n
![\"blue](\"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/blue-iranian-camaro.jpg\")
Excellent Shahab Anisi photo; the car takes up nearly the entire space, the reflections are minimal given the staging, and the background fades into the background.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n![\"Shahab](\"https:\/\/www.autobison.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/shahab-anisi.jpg\")
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"