3 Tips For Instagrammable Car Shoots

Instagram is all the rage.

Well, at least, it’s one of the go-to places for media consumption of your favourite stuff, so it’s no surprise to find plenty of nice things on there – including cars.

With the recent spate of lower COE premiums, more people could be urged to buy a new car, and if you’re in tune with technology, you might want to post your shiny new ride online for your friends to see.

But if you’re new to car photography, you’ll quickly realise that the pictures you take are usually no where near those wallpaper quality stuff you tend to see on manufacturer websites or heck, even those on Insta.

So we thought we’d share a few tips, considering we spend a considerable amount of time taking photographs of cars, so you can proudly show off your new ride without looking like a complete amateur.

Composition is one of the basic elements of any photograph.

Essentially, before you click on the shutter, you should haven taken into account everything that is in your shot.

Many times, we simply point and shoot, and this tends to capture all kinds of clutter into the shot that could be unnecessary and distracting.

After you’ve selected your location of choice, be it the sunset over at Labrador park or some picturesque old bungalow, position your car in a way that enables the vehicle to be the main focus of the shot.

Don’t go with overly cluttered settings, and be sure to remove things like the odd rubbish item lying around or things like a green trash bin.

These things may sound obvious now, but plenty of car photographs exist with all kinds of junk dotting about the picture.

Lighting is not an easy thing to control, especially if you’re shooting in a natural light setting.

A basic rule which most people would have figured out quite quickly – don’t shoot where the sun is facing you.

That’s just going to create a black photo with no real useable value.

Also since you’re not working with professional equipment – in which case if you are this article isn’t really for you – there’s a limit to what most smartphones can do, even if they come with ten camera lenses.

Pick a time of day and location that is bright, but with no direct sunlight that could cause glare and whitewashed photos.

And don’t set your flash to auto. Use it only as needed or keep it off completely, because most smartphone LED flashes are quite poorly set up.

Perhaps the most useful of all is the angle from which you shoot the car from.

A few common shots that tend to show off the car in the way designers intended is to do a “front-three-quarter” shot.

This is the position you’ll see cars shown in media the most, where you get a front facing 45-degree-or-so slant which shows part of the side and rear of the car.

Playing with the amount of slant creates different visual impacts – the car could look longer or shorter depending on how much side you show.

Get down on your knees.

No don’t propose to your car, but most people shoot cars from a standing height, which means that they capture too much roof and too little front lip.

This causes the car to look a bit squashed.

Instead, get down to perhaps chest or abdomen height, where you’ll get a more level shot of the car and actually be able to bring out the design elements in the front grille, headlights and rear haunches of the car.

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