.Tough question. Here's what we do in Perth, Western Australia... Firstly Australia doesn't have the myriad of 3rd party advertising sites that you guys have. Pretty much Carsales and less than a handful of others. Smaller market doesn't support too many and to date Carsales have been the best at promoting themselves to the buying public more than the other sites.
For the record we're using a Nikon D7000 with a basic 18-105mm lens (stabilised) and third party image and date stream firm (Dealer Solutions). We don't have a photo studio so we're taking the pics often in bright sunlight which isn't the best as that will produce sharply defined shadow areas. I little post-processing in Photoshop to reduce that effect with a little unsharp mask thrown in for good measure. Batch processing for everything taken on the day.
In the past we used an external photographer specialising in listing cars on the internet. The trouble was that they only took 8 photos, no post-processing for difficult exposures and we only ever saw them once per week. Now we do it in-house, take more pics, have a better shot list to upload and can do it more regularly significantly the length of time stock is listed without pics.
For us it's about getting the balance between a really good shot set and speed to market. Carsales often tell us we have the best pics for any dealer in Australia that advertises with them. If you know the competition you'll also know that it isn't all that hard to have the best pics
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I'm considering going down the 50mm prime lens path for some external pictures and using a wide say 10-12mm for internal (note the D7000 is a DX not FX camera). 50mm fixed means more legwork for the photographer to compose the shot but also might produce a nice bokeh effect for the background (that blurring you find in portait images) or maybe a 16-85mm instead... Like I say for us it's about producing a good (not necessarily great) set of shots to upload but doing it quickly and swapping lenses takes time.
We also have Winnebago dealership here too and the wide angle lens is superior for interior motorhome pics.
All of this seems to suit us at the moment but any suggestions are always most welcome!
www.winnebagowa.com.au
www.parklandmazda.com.au
www.parklandmazda.com.au/mazda new site in development (old site above is being retired in a week)
