How to photograph cars in rain, winter and bad light (and when to fix it afterwards)
Most car lots do not get to choose the weather. What to do on grey, wet and dark days so the cars still look right online, and where software does a better job than waiting for the sun.
Overcast is your friend, drizzle is not
A bright overcast sky is actually the best light there is for paint: it is one huge soft light source with no harsh reflections. The problem days are the dark, low-cloud ones and the wet ones. If the sky is grey but bright, shoot as normal. If it is grey and dim, the colours go muddy and you will need to do something about it.
Dry the car before every shot
Water droplets on paint act like thousands of tiny lenses and make the finish look mottled. A wet windscreen hides the interior. If there is any break in the rain, dry the car with a towel and shoot straight away. If there is not, shoot under cover: a workshop door, a canopy, a car wash bay with the roller doors open.
Watch the ground
Wet tarmac is a mirror. It throws the sky and the surroundings up into the lower panels, puts a bright reflection under the car and often doubles the clutter in the frame. Where you can, park on a part of the lot that drains, or on paving rather than puddled asphalt.
In winter, use the middle of the day
The usual advice to avoid midday sun reverses in winter. The sun is low all day, so midday is simply the brightest, most even light you will get. Shoot between late morning and early afternoon, and keep the low sun behind you or to one side so it does not flare into the lens.
Dark days need a lower camera and a steadier hand
In dim light a phone slows its shutter and photos go soft. Hold the phone with both hands, brace your elbows against your body, and tap the car on screen to set the exposure before you shoot. If the phone offers a night mode, try it, but check the result: night modes sometimes brighten the sky more than the car.
Keep the same angles whatever the weather
Bad weather tempts people to shoot fast and skip angles. Resist it. A listing with five photos because it was raining is a listing that gets fewer calls for months. Shoot the full set in the usual order, from the twelve angles, and accept that the light is poor rather than cutting the set short.
Do not try to fix the weather with filters
Saturation and contrast sliders make a grey-day photo look like a grey-day photo with a filter on it. Paint colours shift, the sky turns an odd shade and buyers can tell. If a photo looks dull, it is better to leave it honest than to make it look doctored.
Fix the surroundings, not the car
This is where a studio booth earns its keep. Carzbooth takes the car out of the wet lot, clears the grey sky and the puddle reflections off the paint and glass, and stands it in a clean, evenly lit studio. The car itself is not altered: the colour, the panels and every mark on them are as they were. What changes is the room, which is exactly the part the weather ruined.
Decide once, then stop worrying about the forecast
The real cost of bad weather is not one dull photo. It is the dealer who waits for a dry day to list, and the lot where half the cars were shot in sun and half in rain. If every car goes into the same booth, the day it was photographed stops mattering, and a car can be listed the day it arrives.
Every guide to car photography says to shoot in soft light on a dry day. Every dealer knows that cars arrive on Tuesday in the rain and need to be listed by Wednesday. The question is not how to get perfect conditions. It is how to get a usable photo out of the conditions you have, and how to know when it is better to shoot now and fix the surroundings afterwards.
Dry the car, mind the ground, use the brightest part of a winter day, shoot the full set anyway, and leave the filters alone. Then put the car in a booth and let the weather be somebody else's problem.