All of these photo booths and staging areas are really cool, but the post that I like in this thread is the link to the Ecarlist Basics of Great Vehicle Photography article.
Personally, I don't want my people spending all of their time making our inventory look like something that it isn't. I want to capture an image of what my customer is going to see when they come into the store. I want my cars to look like what they are.
Now that certainly doesn't mean that we are going to picture them all pigged out and filthy like they were when we traded for them. We are going to clean and detail them. We are going to take the pictures in the most favorable lighting conditions. We are not going to spend a bunch of time and money to create an image that is not a reasonably good representation of what the vehicle is.
If you have to put an overlay on the photos that say "Actual Photo", or "NOT a stock photo", why not save yourself a whole bunch of time and money and just download stock photos?
We have received a great deal of positive feedback from customers regarding the quality of our photos. They tell us that our cars look like the same car that is on our website. They tell us that there are no surprises with us. They tell us that they feel they could TRUST us because they didn't feel misled by a photo that was 10 times better than the actual car.
Don't get the wrong idea here, I am certainly not criticizing anyone here. I am in a small rural market, and I don't have the competition that many of you have. This is just the way I see it.
I really liked and learned from the Ecarlist guidelines.
