Photographing a car: the bodywork is a mirror

The sentence that sums up the craft: you do not photograph a car, you photograph what it reflects.

Bodywork is a curved, reflective surface. On camera it has almost no colour of its own: it returns the sky, the buildings, the trees, the photographer. The entire job is choosing what it will return.

The hour decides the photograph

Blue hour — the twenty to thirty minutes after sunset — and the first hour after sunrise. The light is soft and directional, and crucially the sky becomes a vast diffuse source, which is precisely what a reflective surface wants.

Midday is the worst possible moment: the sun creates small hard specular hits on the paint, shadows are short and ugly, and the contrast is unmanageable.

A lightly overcast sky is good news. It is a softbox the size of the sky.

The location is chosen for what it reflects

Before thinking about the backdrop, look at what will land on the bodywork.

• An underground car park gives clean graphic reflections, neon lines, a cold controlled mood.
• Wet cobbles double the car and double the light.
• A pale wall works as a natural reflector down the flank.
• A tree overhead drops irregular blotches on the roof and bonnet, and it is almost always ugly.

Focal length: long, not wide

A telephoto between 70 and 200mm for most shots. It compresses perspective and preserves proportion.

Wide angle is the most visible error in car photography: it stretches the bonnet, swells the front wheel and shrinks the rear. The eye catches the problem without naming it, and the picture is filed as "amateur" in half a second.

Wide has its place — a dramatic detail, an interior — but not for the hero shot.

The polariser

The one genuinely irreplaceable accessory here. It lets you:

• dial the reflection on the paint without killing it — bodywork with no reflection at all goes flat and dead
• see through the windscreen to reveal an interior that was a mirror
• saturate a blue sky

It is a continuous control. Rotate to the useful point, almost never to maximum: full effect also removes what was giving the metal its volume.

The shots you always come back with

A usable automotive set always contains:

1. A front three-quarter at headlight height — the reference shot
2. A strict profile, for proportion
3. A rear three-quarter
4. A centred front elevation
5. The brand detail: badge, grille, wheel, logo
6. The interior, driver's side, door open
7. A wide with context, where the car occupies only a third of the frame

Default camera height is headlight height, not eye height. Shooting from standing squashes the car and stretches the roof.

Preparation matters more than equipment

A dirty car cannot be rescued in retouching. Full clean, wheels dried, glass streak-free, tyres dressed. One fingerprint on a black door costs ten minutes of retouching per image.

And scout the location at the intended hour, the day before. What a place looks like at 7pm cannot be guessed at 2pm.

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