Photography for car dealers?

[Dusty Sensiba]

Does anybody here do photos for dealers?

I have talked to a friend who is involved with dealers and he says the companies that do the window stickers usually do a quick point and shoot photo for the inventory on the web site, but I notice most of those royally suck. Usually off white balance, blown highlights, horrible glare and bad composition. Poles sticking out of the car 99.9% of the time.

Has anybody here marketed their services to car dealers?

[entropysedge]

Most of the companies (in NJ the main one is Dealer Specialties) that do those photos get paid on a per vehicle basis and so they are just interested in getting the shots taken and then uploaded to the dealers' websites as well as to 3rd parties contracted with the dealerships for advertising.

The dealership that I work for tried doing the photos in-house for a while... the photos I took were much better quality but we had a hell of a time getting them to the parties that needed them (quite of few of them would only take uploads from the established companies that already do the window stickers so now they're back to the sucky inventory shots.

It did get me some business taking photos for the dealership such as employee images and other photos as well. :D

[Dusty Sensiba]

It's Dealer Specialties in my area as well.

I will probably target the little used car lots as it seems Dealer Specialties doesn't target them too much.

[entropysedge]

Just make sure you find out who or what program they (the dealership) use to upload photos to their website and 3rd party sites such as AutoTrader.com. (I think KelleyBlueBook offers a program for this as well as for the window stickers themselves) You will need an efficient way to match photos to cars else you'll be spending farr too much time in front of the computer and not enough taking pictures.