DIY better car photography...

[Eberhard Weilke]

Apparently, car photography has become a mayor issue in this forum. Well, that’s much better than rightclicked babes which don’t know anything about her luck being posted here. And hey Eric, another 55 pages to post and you keep up with those beauties

Some say, that occasionally I come up with some decent car photography. To be honest, it is actually not that tough to come up with good pictures. Here are a few steps to improve your work. Not all of the pictures in this thread are done by myself, I borrowed some of friends of mine. So, here we go:

Perspective
Perspective is everything! Regardless of the car you have in front of you, there is one general rule of thumb: Low camera point makes every car big, dynamic and mighty:


See, very mighty! When you choose a higher camera position (especially if you can see the roof) the car appears smaller:


Same car, not so mighty.

There is nothing wrong with higher camera positions, ‘though. Higher camera positions are very useful to put the car into some kind of interaction with the background


See how the photographer neatly placed the car in the low right corner on the road. Also he put a nice diagonal line into the picture (which on the other hand caused the lamppost and the horizon to be in an awkward angle to the picture frame. That is pardoned here, because of the neat composition of the whole picture. You can break rules, when you have a good reason

High camera position is also o.k. for documentary photography.



Composition
A rule for proportions called “golden section” has been known since the ancient Greeks days and was first described by the Italian mathematic Leonardo Fibonacci (about 1180-1240). The term is:

a : b = b : (a + b)