How I Improved My Car Photography

I don’t consider myself much of a car photographer, but I like to take a nice picture of a car from time to time.

13 May 2016

I don’t consider myself much of a car photographer, but I like to take a nice picture of a car from time to time. I’m that weird guy who’ll stop in the middle of the street and start experimenting some gymnastics positions and everybody around would ask themselves “what the hell is he doing?!”.

Right, so let’s see how my photos looked like THEN and NOW.

Then

Now

Between THEN and NOW there were some hard way self learned lessons, which were good, self learned lessons are the best, you kinda never forget them and you can share them with others too.

LOW ANGLES ALWAYS LOOK BETTER

If there’s a thing I learned the hard way this would be it, getting to do gymnastics in front of a ton of other people may seem a little bit awkward, but when you just stop caring and focus on the shot everything gets a lot better. Don’t forget you’re actually the one doing stuff they’re just lame walking around you 😉

Please don’t make me explain this one, I don’t have an answer, but for some odd reason this is a super valuable tip.

Smartphone photography is good, but DSLR photography is GOODER 😂

I’m always trying to do everything as cheap as possible and don’t get me wrong smartphone cameras are amazing these days, I’ve got an accessory set of lenses for my iPhone 6 that completely blows it out of the water.

After getting to play with my brother’s DSLR (a Samsung NX30) last summer when I did that whole #MuseumWalk thing I really saw the difference, even if you don’t have a DSLR, a camera completely dedicated to taking pictures is amazing. My latest Gumball 3000 Album was completely shot with my new Sony Alpha A5000 which is great, it basically is a compact camera with a DSLR sensor inside it.

Here's a picture I shot with my phone quite recently.

Try to integrate the car in the scenery

It adds depth to the picture, there are an awful lot of pictures that don’t stand out from the crowd, you have to! 😄 And try not to shoot the car where it always sits, the boring parking lot, but if you do try to make it interesting like I did here.

Don’t fear to get up and personal with the car

Show the car’s curves, vents, bolts, badge or whatever you feel like it’s worth showing 😄

Don’t overdo post-editing

Seriously, nobody likes a photo where you’ve got a filter over a filter. over a filter. I try to keep it as classy as possible, but it depends, you can always do that black and white thing where you let just a colour shine through, it’s a taste thing, it refines in time.

That would be about it, told you I’m not much of a car photographer… what did you expect? 😂

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Comments

Great article! I too went from using my smartphone to now using a DSLR. I’ll grab you a couple pics to compare then and now, here’s one of my old ones…

And here’s an image from Japday that I took with my DSLR last weekend! Big change, no? :D http://i.imgur.com/wNOOJso.jpg

Add another one.
1)Do not tilt the shot. Do you tilt your head when looking at something?
2) Do not take the shot agsint sun (obvious -or not)

Adding a ‘dutch angle’ is a compositional technique, it usually works well when coupled with a wide-angle shot. Shooting into the Sun can also produce some really nice results such as silhouettes, or dramatic lighting/flares if you have high-sync lighting.

Do you have some advices for phone photographers? Like angles, settings and some nice filters?

The advice is the same - a phone camera is still a camera. In fact the camera I have on my Samsung phone is much better than the digital camera I started out with nearly 15 years ago!