January 2009 - Playing the Angles

Basic car photography is pretty simple: you can shoot from the front, back or side. But in order to write a blog more than 15 words long, let me elaborate a bit.

Cars, like people, look better from some angles than from others. A few cars (and people) look good from almost any angle, others from only a very few perspectives—dare I give examples? But in either case some views are better than others. If your purpose is to show a car in its best light, the first thing is to make some mental notes about its strong points—the things that make you like it as you walk around and look at what makes it appealing. Perhaps its angularity or curves, maybe the color, design or its indefinable stance. Perhaps there are unusual individual features that might be emphasized.

This cover from the Parade issue of Pano some 25 years ago utilized a classic angle, showing the "face" of the car as well as that of its driver and navigator. Some variation of a ¾ front will usually work.

 

Then run the appeal logic in reverse: is there some feature that would be best de-emphasized, or even not shown? There are some stunningly ugly grilles and headlight assemblies out there in the wide world of cars, best avoided if you want a picture of your funny automotive valentine for the wall (unless of course it’s the automotive non-beauty that appeals to you). I’d never choose to show an early Mazda RX7 from the rear; the rest of the car was a really good copy of a 924, but they apparently didn’t have good photographs of that design-donor when they were working it out in the clay-model stage.

Here’s one that doesn’t work; the car is positioned awkwardly and the angle emphasizes the rear flank disproportionately. A not handsome picture of a very handsome car.

 

This worked better. Here the low angle says "power", the slightly wide lens emphasizes the front of the car and the rear flank looks right.

 

Here’s how you could make the first Carrera GT picture work for you: crop to select the part of the car that looks good and eliminate what you don’t want.

 

But in automotive beauty photography, some things generally work well. Each car has a “face” and, as with people, you generally need to show it. The standard ¾ front shot, road wheels straight, or better, turned away, is a reliable winner. A variation, from a low angle, can give a sense of power, just as can photographing an individual person from somewhat below their eye level. Limitations creep in if you get too low; losing the opposite fender and hood usually doesn’t work.

I’ve always liked the 996 headlight configuration, and I was intrigued by the jungle approach, especially with these colors, but in retrospect I wouldn’t do this again. The headlight is too isolated, producing a bug-eye effect. A higher angle with the camera moved further to the right might have done the trick.

 

If you’re working with the blessing/curse of having to document the entire car photographically, you’re pretty much stuck with the bad along with the good, but you can choose to de-emphasize the parts you don’t favor. Big square hulking backside (think SUV)? Try a longer lens: wide angle = fat, in cars and people; and station the camera off center, and perhaps a little high.

Rear shots are iffy, and can be boring, but this one works; the swoopy lines of the Rome-Berlin 60K10 give a real feel of its aerodynamic promise.

 

Speaking of high, I’ve always liked the overhead shot. It’s often a lot more difficult and therefore rarer than the more common angles, but it gives an entirely different way of looking at the car. I even cut a big round hole in the ceiling of my garage so that I could shoot down on cars (although that turned out to be not such a good idea; the ceiling is too low to avoid a wide-angle lens and its resultant distortion). Another problem with overheads is that often it is difficult to get the camera truly over the car, which can make for an awkward picture. Using a monopod or similar extension to hold the camera and a remoter release can help; just don’t drop the camera on the car!

Although it’s an arresting angle, this overhead, shot through a hole in the garage ceiling, has a real problem with distortion from the wide angle lens which, in any event, was not well centered.

 

This is more like what I like to see from and overhead, and the subject matter tends to make up for photographic technical imperfections!

 

Try playing some of these angles; although photography limited to cars sounds limited indeed, there are endless variations. And until next time, keep shooting and let me hear from you at: leonardt@pca.org.