Learning the Automotive Photography Ropes

I went to SEMA in Las Vegas this year, and then the Los Angeles Auto Show a month later. The Lexus LFA supercar was at both shows, and I’m my own automotive photographer. So I took lots pictures to share with my readers on About.com. I’m the Guide to Exotic Cars there, and a $400,000 exotic from Lexus is pretty newsworthy.

I’ve spent the last year getting comfortable with taking more pictures than I normally would so that I can edit out the blurry, dark ones and keep the bright, shiny ones. It’s car photography, not noir film, after all. I’ve also learned to use some basic processing tools, like levels and saturation, to correct for hideous convention center lighting.

So I processed the latest round of pictures of the LFA and added them to the image gallery on my About site — and realized I had not one single image of the whole car. I’ve got rear end, front end, interior, close-up of the F logo, wheels … and not one full shot, nose to tail. Well, there is that one from a low angle, all artsy and stuff, but not a straight-up illustrative shot of the car.

Interesting is good, but especially for a reference site like About, I have to get one decent establishing shot. Lesson learned. But the pictures I do have look nice, anyway.