These days you can reach thousands of buyers, free, if you need to sell your car. With websites doing the heavy lifting of matching searches and adverts, the rest is up to you. Good car photography is vital for getting eyes on your ad, and it’s never been easier to make pictures do your sales work for you.
Until surprisingly recently, dealers and private sellers alike were reliant on a photographer from the paper showing up and taking a snap – often on film. It’d be printed, blurry, lost in a page of similar blurry images, yet buyers would decide to call based on this tiny two-inch wide preview. Don’t feel you have to achieve perfection, they never did, but don’t settle for half-obscured, sideways, cropped or screenshot images either. Take a look through the dealer adverts in Parkers Cars for Sale and see for yourself; what makes you want the car, what did you want to see and couldn’t find, and what put you right off?
These days buyers are rapidly scrolling through ads on their smartphone, and a good image will make them stop in their tracks. Most sales sites, such as eBay Motors, will let you use more than one picture and they could be being asked to fill a 6.4-inch high-definition screen. It costs nothing to take as many as you need to get the most flattering angles.
Still want some inspiration? Here are some quick tips to get started, and some habits to be avoided, when photographing your car.
How to photograph your car for sale
Start with preparation. Unless it’s a project or you want to highlight bad areas, give the car a good wash and dry, and if it has faded plastic headlights try giving them a polish first, as the yellowed lenses often look far worse in a picture than they do when you see the car every day.
Find a nice place for your pictures with not too much clutter or rubbish on the road, and at least 10 metres clear space between you and the car. If it’s a sporty car or a convertible, maybe a local park, beach front or country road with picnic spots, but a reasonably clear car park is more than enough. Wait for a bright but overcast day if you want the best results, but if it’s sunny park with the sun more towards front of the car if you can.
Stand back from a front corner and centre the car’s door mirror or front door handle in the frame as a starting point. Try different positions, including crouching down or holding the camera a bit higher, if that helps make it look good.
It doesn’t matter if the car isn’t filling the frame as you can crop later – in fact leaving a bit of space will mean buyers looking on mobile are more likely to see the whole car regardless of screen size.
You want four images like this, one for each corner, as that gives a complete view around the car very quickly. If you’ve got a smartphone with multiple lenses the ‘telephoto’ or ‘zoom’ one will give flattering perspective and reduce the need to crop the image.
Most mobile phones use a wide angle – try to avoid going too close to fill the frame as the car will look curved. Compare the Mazda MX-5 above with the same car below.
Depending on your location, you might want to move the car for doing the front and back images so the background stays the same, or it might be spacious enough to just walk around. However, if the sun is low and one half of the car is in shadow, do move it so the side you are photographing is well-lit – otherwise most of the car will be hard to see, as above.
Take profile pictures of both sides, and straight on front and back. You may not want to use them in an advert, but they’re good to send to interested buyers. If it’s a convertible, you will want to do these pictures twice – once with the roof up, and again with it down.
For the interior, find a shaded space so it’s not all shadows and glare, then sit in the back and take a picture of the dashboard and front seats.
You might want to show the condition of the seats in more detail; try aiming the camera between the windscreen/pillar and open door. This is where your smartphone’s wide angle lens is an advantage!
This is usually enough for an online advert, though if there’s damage, or you have expensive upgrades like large alloys, sophisticated climate control or upgraded in-car entertainment, they’re worth photographing well at the same time as the rest of the car. Even if you don’t use them in the advert you can send them to interested buyers without having to go and take more pics.
A detailed under-bonnet shot for performance models, or a clean and tidy boot for estate/family cars, will tempt those specialist buyers as well.
We don’t recommend covering the number plate unless it is a private plate that isn’t included with the car and has already been removed, as it usually looks like an attempt to hide the car’s history or prevent people checking the MOT status. As a rule, buyers who are going to do that before asking about the car are going to be easier to deal with if they do decide to get in touch.
Car photography – how to get great images
Begin with the basics – composition and framing. You’ll get the most flattering results for car exteriors when you’ve got room to stand back, avoiding distortion and making the car look big relative to the background or horizon.
With a wide-angle lens and close up, this Renault 4 (below) would be distorted and there would be a lot of detail of the garden and grounds behind it. A long lens highlights the narrow, boxy shape, and keeps the focus on the car rather than the scenery.
The image of the PT Cruiser below shows how not to do it; it’s a quick iPhone snap. There’s a cluttered background, the wide angle lens has distorted the car, and the lack of a polariser means lots of unwanted reflections in the paintwork.
If you are using a traditional (DSLR or compact) camera, choose a lens around 75mm (most compacts give their equivalent) and stand about 10-15m (two to three car lengths) away. This will keep the front and rear of the car in proportion with the background and create a flattering perspective. Cameras with high-resolution sensors are more flexible, it doesn’t matter too much if you only have a standard (50mm) lens as you can often stand a similar distance away and crop the picture later.
Smartphones usually have wide-angle lenses and lower resolution sensors (though there’s still plenty of scope for cropping to web resolutions). You don’t need to stand as far back to get the whole car in the frame, and you may find a good composition just a few paces backwards from the car, but it’s still better to keep a good distance from the car and crop to keep the proportions right, instead of getting closer to fill the frame.
Cameras in smartphones differ wildly and getting the best out of them is an article in itself. If you have an iPhone ‘Max’, you’ve got a great combination of lenses for interior and exterior images. If you have an Android smartphone with a really high resolution sensor, even if it doesn’t have different lenses, you can safely use the digital zoom and still get a large enough file. In fact, the only ‘bad’ combination is a low-resolution sensor plus digital zoom, as it has no benefit over cropping.
Seeing the light – and shadow – makes a difference
Whether you’re selling a car, or just want to share a cool spot at a show or on the street for your Instagram feed, there are a couple of things that can really help those images pop.
First, on shiny glass and paintwork, reflections are your both your friend, and your enemy – and you’ll want to control them. When using a camera it’s easy, you just add a circular polariser (CPL) using the filter thread on the lens. Once quite expensive, you can now get good quality circular polarisers for very little outlay even in larger sizes.
The CPL is arguably the most useful accessory you can add for photographing cars, as it allows control of reflections on bodywork and windows. Smartphone lens accessories often include these filters as well – even dash cams have stick-on polarisers to cut glare, but they’re generally a fit-and-forget piece that can’t be adjusted.
This Citroen, above and below, has been photographed using a circular polariser to remove reflections from the side. There’s a side effect, however. Polarisers control light approaching the lens from a given angle (the same tech is used to make privacy screens for monitors). Notice that removing the paintwork reflection allows a bigger reflection on the windscreen. Like everything, choose the result you like best; for a reflection-free image in these circumstances the in-depth approach is to take several images and make a composite.
Second, look out for what shadows are doing; place yourself – and the car if you can – for the best lighting and lowest glare; try and keep the sun behind you as a starting point (but watch out for your shadow in the frame!). Your camera or smartphone flash will add reflections if the car is in shadow and not much else.
If you’re at an outdoor car show with friends, the best thing you can get is a white or silver pop-up fabric reflector. Just pop it open and bounce the sunlight to the shadowed side of the car, and you’ll get a great, natural-looking image. For indoor shows it’s better to take advantage of the impressive high sensitivity of modern tech – or use a tripod – than try using flash, particularly if there’s a lot of artificial light already.
While we’re at the car show, if you’ve taken the time to travel there and really want pictures of cars rather than people, a more advanced camera will let you choose long exposures. In addition to a tripod, you may need a neutral density filter to make this work, but it’s great for indoor events. Pop the camera on the tripod in aperture priority mode, set the ISO as low as you can and the aperture as small as necessary to get an exposure between 30 seconds to two minutes. Depending on the crowds, you’ll usually get a clear, crisp image of the car – and no people!
This can also be useful if you want to photograph your own car in a busy place.
While these guidelines are for getting the most ‘realistic’ look of a whole car, don’t be afraid to play with close up, wide views of details, or tightly-cropped shots of lights, trim or wheels. All that really matters is if you’re happy with the pictures you’re taking.
How to improve your smartphone images
Most smartphones since 2015 can take excellent pictures of cars, with just the right field of view and vivid colour rendition, plus enough resolution for any reasonable use. You can still make them better, though, with character or detail to suit your needs.
One of the best smartphone image editing apps you can get, and it’s free, is Snapseed. It has simple recipes for popular looks, but also offers intuitive, detailed control of shadows, detail and cropping. Too much shadow, or overly bright sky? Use an HDR mode and you can often make the adjustments you need. Car looks a bit flat? Add some structure or detail. There’s no hard and fast rule here, just experiment and find the results that make you happy the way you want to, though the more extreme looks will probably put off potential buyers.
Think brochure, not album cover if you’re selling a car, but for social media and just enjoying making art, go wild.
You can also get apps that allow raw capture from the camera. This allows more flexibility in processing for HDR without the image degrading too much, as well as other benefits if you plan to delve deeper.
Finally, many smartphones now offer multiple cameras or portrait modes to blur backgrounds, and some (such as the Doogee S98 range) add night vision or thermal cameras. You don’t necessarily need a high-end camera to get advanced photographic tools, though it’s probably cheaper to have a secondhand DSLR and a functional smartphone than it is to buy the latest high-end iPhone!
Is it worth the effort of taking good pictures for an advert?
It’s easy to get disenchanted with the response from online adverts, particularly through free options such as Facebook Marketplace. But here’s a simple, personal experience. After months of advertising the same car with pictures hurriedly taken on the driveway, I decided to refresh the advert with a trip to a nearby farm with a wide open space and simple barn as a background. Within a few hours of spending 15 minutes on these new images, the car was sold.
And if you’re paying for your advert, it makes no sense doing anything other than getting the best you can.
So yes. It really is worth the effort.
