As a photographer it’s always good to be able to photograph subjects that are also passions of your own. I’m a motor fanatic and have always loved the sound and smell of all cars – and yes, to a degree also electric vehicles. Therefore I love photographing all types of cars.
I first started photographing cars commercially back in 2001 for a website I was building for a car dealership. At that time, I also built websites and also provided the professional imagery for that website (so many people don’t take imagery on their website seriously enough, even though it’s their main shop window).
To capture all of the photos I needed, I used to drive up weekly to the dealership to photograph new stock, and then added the photos to the website.
At that time, Autotrader was in its infancy, and that meant that I needed to use standalone software to be able to upload the images to their new website. Also, in those days, the internet was far slower than it is today so it could take some time to upload the new photographs! It was a fun yet very time-consuming activity however the client really believed in exceptional images and was happy to cover my fees and relevant expenses. It was a joyful job for me!
(For those of you who don’t know, Autotrader was a magazine where you could buy cars. The magazine ceased to be printed in 2013 and now is entirely online.)
For this work with the dealership, I bought a new camera specifically for the job – an Olympus C-1, a 1.3 Megapixel camera – which was paid for within three months. The client didn’t ask for me to do this, it was my choice in order to get the best possible images for the website.
The photo of the Ford Galaxy was taken using this camera and was 144dpi, in size, 287KB and it was stored on an 8MB SmartMedia card.
At that time, for websites you didn’t need anything better because the internet was slow (broadband was still wishful thinking) and the images had to be web prepared (made smaller in size) for a quick download.
Nowadays, I use a range of Canon cameras for photography and video, but my main two cameras are the Canon 5DSR (50 Megapixels) using many interchangeable lenses.
You can see by the huge rise in the number of Megapixels that things have moved on dramatically in the sense of clarity and resolution. Even the majority of mobile phones have 12 megapixels or more!
The photos I take are often just over 60 Mb in size compared to the 278Kb when I started, and the cards I save photos these days are 128Gb. The camera equipment available makes life a lot easier when photographing fast moving vehicles!
What do I need when photographing cars for car dealerships or capturing car events?
These days branding, marketing brochures and all photography for promotional material needs to be of high quality, therefore a photographer must have the highest quality cameras and lens. A client will expect this even if they don’t know the detail.
Photographing motorsport is very like photojournalism – capturing a narrative of the event – where the main activity happens at speed.
Photography tools and paraphernalia, I may need are:
- Large reflectors to highlight the sexy lines of the car
- Lighting rigs
A range of different lenses - A monopod – for using when doing a panning shot.
- Big lenses for trackside race photographs
- Fast shutter speeds to freeze the car – capturing it in complete focus
- Or slower shutter and panning with the car to blur the background
- Wide angle lenses for paddock photos to capture as much as possible.
You can find images on my gallery to get a sense of how I capture these specialist images: Automotive and Racing Car Photography – Moore Photographics (moore-photographics.com)
If you are interested in having photos of any special cars that you own then please get in touch – neil@moore-photographics.com
