Taking Great Photos @ ExplorOz

Film vs Digital	Photographing Items for Sale
Photographic Principles	Photography Tours
Photography Techniques	Camera Clubs
Image Editing Software	Article Feedback
Photo Organising Software	Related Pages

In this Article

Film vs Digital

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Most people buying a new camera today will find that it is hard to ignore the range and capabilities of the digital cameras – in fact, many stores stock few, if any film cameras. The good news is, however, that your biggest challenges are mastering the new controls and understanding how to get the photos off your camera for storage or printing. Other than that, the principles of photography still apply, and the quality of your results in many circumstances will be as good or better.

Many of us, however, have our trusty film cameras which we love and are familiar with, and there is no need to change what works for you.

This article, therefore is relevant whether you use a digital or film camera as we will discuss general tips for photography when travelling, to give you some ideas for how to get better photos than what you be doing already.

We aren’t going to tackle lengthy discussion of advanced techniques but we will discuss the principles of photography and give some practical tips for travelling scenarios.

First, let's summarise the main reasons to go digital and explain some of the new terminology that surrounds the modern world of photography.

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Top Reasons to Go Digital

Immediate image review and deletion

Large and convenient image storage (thousands of photos vs the 24 or 36 shots available per roll of film)

Photos may be downloaded and stored electronically

Photos can be quickly and easily emailed to family/friends or stored on CD

You can crop and adjust your photos with image editing software before printing

You can select just your favourite photos for printing rather than paying to have all photos printed

You tend to take more photos because you don't have to keep the duds - because the more pics you take, the more practice you get and the better the odds of taking a good one

You have the option of printing your own photos or having them printed at a mini-lab or pro-lab

Mini-lab printing costs are now very low at the chain stores

Images may be copied from one medium to another without any degradation

Most digital cameras enable you to work in low light, and there is no need to change films to do this

Summary of Digital Terms

JPEG (pronounced JAY-peg):-

LCD:-

Memory Card:-

Photographic Principles

Bright sunny days bring out the colours of a scene to the eye but to the unskilled photographer can create washed out photographs, and also great areas of contrast with harsh dark shadows, and extremely bright areas. Very high sunlight will create shadows on people's faces or may cause your subject to squint. A flash, when used as the only source of light, will also create hard light with bright subjects against dark backgrounds. In this sort of situation the quality of light affects the mood of the picture so use the dark shadows as design elements or soften them with fill flash.

Overcast days are often preferable for portraits (photos of people), as there are no harsh shadows under eyes, nose and chins. Flowers are also best photographed on cloudy days. The soft light of a cloudy day is actually very friendly to novice photographers and to semi-automatic cameras, with few shadows to confuse your auto-settings. Of course with the lower light conditions, slower shutter speeds will be required, so wind motion can become a problem.

One of the biggest issues for travellers is timing. All light has colour, and early or late in the day, sunlight has a soft warm golden glow, sometimes emphasised by dusty atmospheric conditions. Since the Australian outback is best depicted by earthy red glows, this warm glow tends to show off most natural forms to their best advantage and you'll be rewarded with quality photographs if you take the time to be on location in the early or late hours. Obviously, this may affect your travel plans so wise photographers get involved in the travel plan. Why not select some photographic highlights that you know will be best achieved in the early/late hours and work out your daily driving plan to ensure you do not upset the rest of your travelling party by wanting to stay on to get "the perfect photo", when everyone else is wanting to push on to get a hot shower at the caravan park just 50km away. Taking advantage of “first light” – even before dawn, and the few moments around sunrise provides beautiful light conditions – this can mean getting up before anyone else is up, but will make fitting your photography passion into the travel schedule easier.

When it comes to the direction of light, there are 360 degrees of possibilities. When the light isn't working for you, change it by moving your position or your subject's position, or the light itself, if possible. Sometimes waiting for the right light is an option, or noting how the light might be at some other time of day, and then coming back at that time for the photography.

The reason everyone positions people in outdoor photos to look into the sunlight is to remove shadows from faces but this is just a method of moving the subject to achieve front lighting. Learning how to use flash will improve your control of front lighting and with practise you'll use it in many situations including daytime photography, and especially in portrait photography. Other techniques including putting the subject near a source of reflected light.

Side lighting is perfect when you want to emphasize texture, dimension, shapes or patterns. Side lighting sculpts a subject, revealing contours and textures. Use side lighting to exaggerate dimension an depth. At a 45-degree angle to the side, its one the most flattering types of portrait lighting.

Light that comes from behind your subject is by far the most difficult to use. Taking a photograph that is backlit means that direct light is reaching your camera's light sensor so any auto program will reduce the aperture, resulting in less light reaching the foreground of your picture. If you have placed a person in the foreground, such as a person in front of the sunset scene, the result will be a silhouette of their body outline. If that's not your intent, then you'll need to provide some sort of front or side lighting. Many digital cameras will have a backlight compensation button (or learn to use exposure compensation) that will help in this situation to properly exposure your subject, but you may end up washing out the background and lose the soft sunlight glow. Using fill flash in this situation is usually the ideal - as this will give your portrait a glowing "halo" of rim light and prevents the silhouette effect.

Sunset photo with silhouette of spinifex grass in foreground

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Using a Flash

Most cameras come with a built-in pop-up flash and the camera will usually automatically sense when flash is required. Unfortunately, this is not fail-proof and often the pop-up flash is not sufficiently strong enough for your needs – it will only work at short subject distances. Here's some basic flash tips:

Stay within flash range. Check your camera manual for the recommended range, usually 1 - 3m. Keep the whole subject (for instance, all the people in the shot) at a similar distance from the flash.

A higher-speed film (or higher ISO setting) may extend your flash by a few feet, so it does pay to use higher-speed film (or ISO settings) even indoors for flash pictures.

Batteries that are approaching exhaustion will not give full flash power even if the camera is still working – be sure to wait for the flash to recharge.

Prevent red-eye by asking your subjects to look slighty away from the camera, and turn on all the room lights to shrink their pupils.

Avoid use of the "red-eye reduction" flash setting - too many people find it's distracting and confusing, and results in people blinking or moving as they don't know when the actual photo has been taken – you can fix any “red-eye” problems when editing or printing your image.

Try to soften the flash if you can – the bottom of a white plastic milk bottle, or some white shower curtain material or similar will help reduce the harshness of the flash.

Fill Flash

The built-in flash on your camera is designed to be just enough flash light to fill in areas of a picture that would otherwise be too dark, but it generally does not have the range for long distance illumination. Fill flash balances the scene so that the subject is properly exposed and the background (beyond the flash range) is left alone.

Use fill flash for sunny day portraits to fill in the dark shadows under eyes, nose, chin, hat etc. It can also help to balance highly contrasting colours such as a portrait of a dark skinned complexion on a bright beach background. Fill flash is also useful for side-lit and back-lit pictures that still require a balance of front lighting.

Flash Off

There are occasions when your camera thinks the flash is needed but in fact it isn't.

When you are too far away from your subject for the flash to be effective

When the flash would create annoying reflections from mirrors etc

At sunset or in other low-light situations where you'd like a foreground subject to be silhouetted

Where the quality of the existing light is beautiful and creates a mood that you'd like to capture

Where flash is not allowed (prop yourself on a rail, or wall, or use a tripod)

Where you want to use a slow shutter speed for motion blur, or panning.

Using Different Lenses

In photography a "normal lens" is a lens that generates images that retain a "natural" perspective and is roughly comparable to the human vision. Lenses of shorter focal length are called wide-angle lenses, while longer focal length lenses are called telephoto lenses.

For a 35 mm camera, the most commonly used normal lens is 50 mm, and anything with a focal length 35 mm or less is considered wide-angle. Common wide-angle lenses for a full-frame 35 mm camera are 35, 28, 24, 21, 18 and 14 mm. Wide-angle lenses come in both fixed-focal-length and zoom varieties.

In digital photography the situation is more complex. Most interchangeable-lens digital cameras are in the same form as 35 mm cameras, but have photosensors that are smaller than the image area of full-frame 35 mm cameras. This results in a narrower angle of view for any given focal length lens than would occur in a full-frame camera. On digital cameras lenses typically have a field of view that is the equivalent of a lens 1.6 times the focal length of the lens. The common 50 mm normal lens on a full-frame camera would have the field of view an 80 mm lens on a digital camera. A typical flexible zoom lens might be 28 - 80 mm on a full-frame camera. This would require an 18-55 mm digital lens (as comes standard on say, the Canon 300D) for an equivalent field of view.

A zoom lens allows the photographer to vary its focal length, as opposed to a prime lens, which has a fixed focal length. Zoom lenses are often described by the ratio of their longest to shortest focal lengths, eg. 100mm - 400mm may be described as a 4x zoom. Photographic zoom lenses should not be confused with telephoto lenses, those with narrow angles of view that bring the subject in closer. Some zoom lenses are telephoto, some are wide-angle, and others cover a range from wide-angle to telephoto. Lenses in the latter group of zoom lenses, sometimes referred to as "normal" zooms, have displaced the fixed prime lens as the popular one-lens selection on many contemporary cameras.

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Photography Techniques

Learning the theory of the photography and all the various techniques would take volumes and that is not what I intend to achieve in this section, but here are some basic tips that will give you some good grounding for your outdoor holiday photography.

Composing your Photo

Photo composition is all about how you frame your picture, the field of view (determined by the focal length of the lens you have chosen (the amount of zoom), and how you position interest or natural features in the foreground and background. Composition is part of the art of photography – what composition appeals to one person may not appeal to the next. Some people seem to naturally have a great eye for how to compose interesting photographs, yet for others you'll need to learn some design theory and guidelines. If you don't know the following, may I suggest some further reading: Rule of Thirds, Leading Lines, Isolation (Selective Light/ Selective Focus), and Shooting Angles (Low or High).

Taking Scenery Photos

Although a great scene can photograph well at any time of day, if you shoot just after dawn or dusk, the sun will have that magic light and warm tone that works spectacularly with the Australian outback. Red sand dunes, for example, will be really emphasised and will contrast even more with the blue sky.

When working with harsh light, one small, relatively inexpensive piece of equipment that can assist daytime scenery photographs is a polariser (make sure it is a circular polariser). You'll need to purchase one to fit each of your lenses as they are sized by the diameter and screw to the end of the lens. Polarisers work in the same manner as they do for sunglasses, they cut down glare and restore true colour depth to your photographs. You need to learn how to use the polariser as it needs to be adjusted (by rotating) to (for instance) bring out the blue in the sky, or reduce the glare from a water body. Polarisers do, however, reduce the amount of light getting to your sensor or film, so in low light conditions, they may be inappropriate.

Wide-angle lenses are ideal for scenery photos, especially in the Australian outback where the landscapes are often vast and widespread. Often, the better quality Digital SLR (D-SLR) cameras will include a kit zoom lens (for instance 18–55 mm) which is ideal as the short focal length is provides a wide field of view for all but the most panoramic of scenes, and the long focal length is sufficient for portrait photography. This range will limit your ability to zoom in close on very long distance shots, so the additional purchase of lens to about 200 mm would give you the ability to zoom in tight on a small item in the distance.

A fine all-around lens for landscape photography is the 50 mm lens (or 35 mm digital lens), that comes as standard equipment on many 35 mm SLR cameras although depth of field is greatest with wide-angle lenses, so use them if you want the entire scene from close foreground subjects, from the foreground to mountains and sky at infinity. With telephoto lenses, depth of field reduces, though for many subjects, the smallest aperture still allows sufficient depth of field – naturally with a narrower field of view it it less important to have a deep depth of field because there is unlikely to be as much interest in the foreground and background – the subject is likely to fill the frame. At a wide-open aperture and a close distance, you can use the very soft background of a telephoto lens to differentiate a person, wild animal or object from the rest of the scenery. With either wide-angle or telephoto lenses, you may need a tripod in low light – the alternative is to invest in a “fast” lens.

A larger aperture (smaller f-number) provides more light but the focus is critical

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A smaller aperture (larger f-number) allows less light through but the focus is less critical

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In approaching a landscape, you intuitively or deliberately arrange elements of the scene into a meaningful composition. Unlike candid forms of photography, landscapes depend heavily on composition for their success. Viewpoint is influenced by the angle, height, tilt and distance of the camera. A change in viewpoint can be the answer when you seem to be getting nowhere with a landscape. One trick in particular for taking photos of your campsite, is to walk well beyond the range of your camp area - ideally find a high point looking down on your site, this will show the general surroundings and tell a story, particular if your campsite is in a very remote area of a desert. These sorts of photos are not about showing detail, but more about the story.

Another small trick is to add recognisable objects into your scene to add dimension, a person is the usual tool here, for example a shot of a canyon seems nothing without the comparison to the size of a human, and once included in the composition seems to explain why the photo was taken.

Another trick is to break the rules - especially the rule of thirds. If the sky is important to the scene, you may want to lower the horizon; if the foreground is more interesting, you can raise the horizon or perhaps eliminate it. Move back to bring a new element into the picture, forward to remove an object from the frame's edge. Spend time preparing your “canvas” and take control. Don't be afraid to experiment, especially with a digital camera where you can learn rapidly by trial and error and it doesn't cost a cent. The interesting thing about photography is that no two people see the world in exactly the same way.

My particular style has a lot to do with my preferred lens - being the wide angle. I purposefully frame my landscape with something nearby as my foreground subject (this could be a person, an overhanging branch, or the edge of a rock), whilst focussing and optimising light on the scene of the background.

Another way to take scenery photos it to close in on a particular texture, rather than make your photography replicate the actual human view. Go beyond what the eye sees and show the elements that are special - the ripples of a sand dune, the shadow of a lone branch on dry ground, or the reflection of a tree in still water.

The three photographs below of the Perth city skyline were taken on the same day at the same time by three different photographers at the same vantage point. It is interesting to note the difference in composition and the effect on the scene.

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Interesting foreground adds colour and action (off centre).

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Interesting use of natural foreground element to frame the industrial view.

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Taking Action Photos

Perfect action shots are actually quite hard to obtain. Action shots are of moving subjects and unfortunately most cameras aren't that good at taking photos when the subject is moving. You'll most likely get a blurry image because the subject has moved while the shutter is open. The trick is to freeze the action and remove motion blur, yet still give the illusion of movement.

The movement of every object has it’s own complexities – for instance a helicopter’s rotor or a horse’s legs is quite different to a racing car’s wheel.

With a fast moving subject, you can use a faster shutter speed to achieve a sharp image with no motion blur. One way to do this is use your camera's Shutter Priority mode which gives you the ability to increase shutter speed to at least 1/250 second – but fast moving subjects will require even faster shutter speeds. If you don't have shutter priority mode, decrease the ISO setting (digital camera). This will tend to increase the shutter speed automatically because you have enabled the camera to work with less light (at the expense usually of image quality). Although this will freeze the action, you'll also freeze the illusion of movement, thereby the result will look like the subject is not moving at all. An example is when a stationery photographer tries to take a photo of a vehicle driving past on the road, lines up the shop and waits for the vehicle to be in the frame and then takes the shot using a very fast shutter speed of say 1/500 sec, or even 1/1000 sec.

A better solution to taking a photo of a moving object that remains in focus, whilst the background is blurred, is to pan the moving object. Panning, means you follow the subject with your camera (ie. move the camera) and only press the shutter when the object reaches the position you wish to take the shot. The background will be blurry as it will have moved relative to the camera during the same time but the subject will remain in focus.

When taking action shots that are not truly fast moving, such as 4WD obstacles, which could be large boulders, steep dunes, or rutted tracks, you want your photography to purvey the extremes angles and give the viewer something to marvel at. An excellent way to depict this in photographs is to get down low and take the photography of the underbody of the vehicle - even better if you use a wide angle lens and move in very close to achieve some distorted perspective and make the closer object appear larger, for instance.

But these tricks all work if you have a simple subject to work with, however what about when your subject is the terrain, ie. a steep hill climb. Many a traveller's trip snaps just don't do justice to the terrain but you can improve the result by understanding how to use perspective and shadows to depict shape and form.

Shadows:-

Perspective:-

Using these to things together, can allow you to choose a viewpoint and focal length to emphasise the aspects of the subject that are important.

Rocks:-

Vertical Trees:-

The skilled photographer will purposefully chose a viewpoint and shooting angle for a photograph depicting a steep hill climb to best capture size and dimension, rather than flatten it out which may render the hill to appear as if a straight flat road leading ahead. Obviously composition plays a large part too and using a digital camera you'll be able to experiment by trial and error until you get just the right result.

Taking Portraits

When taking photos of your family and friends on holiday, you'll get the best results if you can take candid photos where its obvious that there's plenty of fun. Use high shutter speeds and use a telephoto lens set to long focal lengths to avoid subjects knowing they are being photographed - this ensures more relaxed subjects and almost invariably better portraits. This will also tend to make the background soft emphasising the subject as discussed earlier.

You don't have to take a front-on, full length photo to photograph a person nicely. In fact, most people photograph most attractively with a short depth of field, often achieved in conjunction with a candid moment such as standing a long way back so they are not intimidated by the camera, and using a long focal length lens. My favourite long digital lens is the 90-100 mm for this type of portrait.

Posed photos need a beautiful element; this can either be the subject's attractive looks, or the attractive mood of the photo set by clever use of lighting. A posed portrait does not necessarily have to be framed full centre to be the main subject of the photograph either. Always consider creative composition to add beauty to your portraits.

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Low depth of field gives muted background effect

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Macro Photography

Life gets more interesting when you can get a 1:1 image size or closer. Photos of tiny details such as eyes on a fly, aphids on the petal of a flower, or reflections in a droplet of water are all examples of things that can only be photographed using a macro lens.

In all photography (including macro), as the lens gets closer to the subject , the image gets larger on the film (or image sensor) so the light reaching the sensor is lessened. The depth of field also becomes very shallow and to combat this, very small apertures are called for, which lessens the light even more. Both these things in combination mean that normal handheld exposures are usually out of the question. A tripod is needed for steadiness plus flash or reflector is needed in nearly every circumstance to give decent illumination.

Compact digital cameras often have a macro mode that lets you get close to the subject and get a good image but they usually end up with the lens very close to the subject, which is fine for flowers and static objects but can annoy insects and alter their behaviour and narrow depth of field is often an insurmountable issue.

In compact cameras look for the “macro” mode (usually a tulip symbol) and maybe also a “super macro” mode (tulip plus a ‘s’ is one way to show it). Often the flash is automatically disabled on compact digital cameras when working at the “super macro” distances, as the subject is too close for proper coverage. Make sure you have some other means of lighting in that case. Some digital cameras allow the in-body flash to be set at lower output in order to still trigger the slave flash but not produce too much light from the position of the camera.

Remember that aluminium foil, styro-foam and other bright surfaces make good and inexpensive reflectors.

There's another little trick with digital cameras and closeups. If you take your photo using the camera's highest resolution setting (to maximise file size), and go in as close as your lens (and light) will allow, you can get the illusion of enlargement by cropping the picture on your computer (with image software) to create a full frame picture of the subject that retains sufficient quality suitable for printing a 6"x4" or for email/web use.

If you're serious about macro photography, you'll probably need to invest in specialised lenses, adaptors, ring-flashes and slaves (don’t we all love slaves).

Taking Low-Light Photos

Skilled photographers normally carry a tripod to enable photographs to be taken with slow shutter speeds, and thus eliminate camera shake in low-light settings. However, this technique will only work if the subject is stationery, such as a sunset. The novice will immediately use a flash, however this often spoils the mood created by the natural light that is reason the photo is desired, eg. sunset. What do you do in situations without a tripod? Learning how to prop the camera to minimise camera shake, and understanding how to use special features on your digital camera such as backlight may enable you to take a very special low-light photograph that retains all the mood of the moment. Alternatively, get creative and purposefully go for the silhouette photo - this works well for people watching a sunset or trees, posts, houses … objects in the foreground.

Remember, if you can’t use a tripod, a small bean-bag, a post, a bonnet, a roof … any firm surface may be a good alternative, and if you do not have a remote release, remember to use the “self-timer” mode to minimise camera shake.

In instances where you need to capture moving objects in low-light this is best achieved with a flash. Another low-light scenario where flash works well, is where you have a foreground subject in the dark (such as person sitting at night in a camp chair), with moonlight sky. If the subject is the person, not the moon, then you can balance the light of the photograph with fill flash on the person.

To take a photo of the moon, you need a long focal length lens, a tripod, long time exposure, and no flash.

Effective silhouette in foreground of sunset photo. Taken at 1/13 sec at f 5.6 with ISO 1600 (no flash). Could be improved with tripod.

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Image Editing Software

One obvious advantage of digital cameras is the ability to manipulate the photo using computers. Most digital cameras store the photographic image as a jpg file format, which is a standard computer format. All digital cameras will come with software and cables that enable you to take your photos from your camera and store them on your computer. Most will also include some form of image gallery software to help you organise and file your photos, and these programs often include some basic tools such as crop, rotate, flip and mirror, and some simple lighting adjustments that attempt to improve any obvious lighting problems in the photographic image. For a novice photographer, these tools will be sufficient to get you by, but for the more serious enthusiast, you'll probably require more image editing tools and perhaps a better image organising system.

Although there are lots of options, only a few have become standard by professional or serious amateur photographers. Photoshop (from Adobe) is the universal image editing software program used by graphic designers all over the world and is widely used by digital photographers. It is relatively expensive and complex to learn the program unless you already have a fair degree of graphics knowledge and a understanding of graphics terminology. An alternative is Paint Shop Pro (by Jasc Software). This program has similar capabilities to PhotoShop for the average user and is more user friendly for the novice. As with most software, you can download a trial version over the internet for free and if you like it, you can purchase a full licence online. One of the nice things about Jasc Software is that once you've purchased a fully licenced version, you can upgrade to each new version for free.

Photo Organising Software

Photo organisers can help you sort through your stockpile of digital images and arrange them the way you want. The best programs also include a convenient collection of editing and enhancing tools as well as a variety of ways to share your pics. A good example is Picasa 2 from Google, Lightroom from Adobe, iPhoto from Apple (for the Mac) or iView Media Pro from Microsoft.

Some features to look for are:

You can obviously use the internet to read reviews of the various software available but for us, we use Picasa2. This organiser is owned by Google and is also one of the only top rating organising software programs that is free. Picasa works for us because of its ability to store literally thousands of photographs in an intuitive and well designed system that can be shared over a network so can be used by all our staff to easily locate images in our library that has been expanding rapidly over the last 7 years. Picasa has some smart features that we value, these are:

Ability to modify an image for printing or emailing without affecting the source file. This minimises duplication of large photographic files and enables us to maximise disk storage.

Ability to instantly select photos and automatically resize for sending via email without affecting the original. No messy saving, resizing or renaming. This feature also allows you to slide a scale to fix a setting for the email resizing. ie. resize to 1024 pixels, or 800 pixels, or 640, or 480, or 320 pixels or 160 pixels.

Ability to organise photos into folders with different names to the directory structure of the actual files. This gives us control and customisation at the front end of the program without messing around with where the photos are stored. A very user-friendly file organiser.

A keyword search function that enables a long-list of keywords to be assigned to each photo. If photos have been saved with keywords this is a very useful tool for people other than the photographer, to immediately find relevant photos for a project.

Picture tray enables you to select and hold pictures as you browse through multiple folders. The picture tray can then be exported, printed, collaged, or given a label for future use.

Photographing Items for Sale

Trader

On this website you'll find we operate a Trader - this is a marketplace for people buying and selling privately owned, second hand goods. Whilst sellers may list an item for sale for free, this is only a text-based advertisement. To show photographs of your item for sale in the ExplorOz Trader, you need to purchase a Display Advertisement from as little as $9.95.

The ExplorOz Trader enables sellers to upload photos directly from your computer to the advertisement using the online system that will crop and resize your photo to best suit our image specifications. But before you upload your original 6 Meg photograph, we'd like to give you a few tips for maximising how you present your goods for sale:

How to photograph a Vehicle

To obtain a nice clean photograph of your vehicle, you need to find a viewpoint that has a simple, clean background. Avoid showing any extra items in your photo, even if this is just powerpoles, bins, or people. Most people tend to photograph their vehicle on their front lawn - this is ok, although houses can be a distracting background so try to keep it out of the shot. Other ideas are up against a wall - this could even be in a carpark if you can position it suitably, or even on a stunning sand dune if it's a 4WD.

When taking photos outside, the best results will be achived when the vehicle is parked out of direct sunlight. Direct sun will create too much contrast for the camera and your shots will either be too dark with bright section or too bright with heavily shadowed areas. Bright sunlight also tends to alter the car's colour. You are best to take vehicle photos on overcast days, or by shooting in an area of shade where lighting will be softer. Using a flash may create a washed-out representation of the colour of your vehicle and usually results in unbalanced light and shadows in the picture.

Experiment with positioning. Ideally, your photo should contain your vehicle in full-frame, ie. try to adjust your zoom so the vehicle almost fills the screen, leaving a small area around it for balance.
Using a digital camera will enable you to check each photo and make adjustments until your photos show your vehicle in a realistic fashion.

The purpose of the Trader offering you the ability to show multiple photos is so you can show a range of angles to enable people to review your vehicle without actually physically being there. Many vehicles are sold over the internet, and the better you can show people the factual information; what sort of condition it's in, its colour, how it looks from all angles, the more likely you are to sell your vehicle quickly. We advise the following angles (all taken from a normal standing position at eye-height to avoid distortion):

Photo showing the car from front three-quarter

Photo showing the car from side on

Photo showing the car from the rear three-quarter

An interior shot if relevant

How to save/upload your photo to the Trader

If you've used a digital camera to take the photograph of your vehicle, there is no need to upload the original high-resolution file. You can either adjust the settings for resolution at the time of taking the photograph (set it to medium) or you can reduce the pixel dimensions with image editing software before uploading. JPEG (file extension is “.jpg” is the ideal compression format for photos on the internet.

If you wish to use a photograph that you have as a print, simply take a scan. Your scanning software will allow you to save the file in jpeg format, and all you need to do is make sure you don't set the resolution too high. Just as with digital camera photos, going for too much resolution is a waste. Remember that the Trader system will further resize your photos automatically to suit our format.

Photography Tours

With the obvious mix of new technology, and our wonderful Australian bush scenery, its no wonder that most travellers take hundreds, even thousands of photographs when travelling around Australia. Unfortunately, most photographers find themselves in battles with their travelling companions that simply don't understand the need to spend extra time getting the angles, and lighting right for every photo. Unless you have a very understanding travel companion or have planned your trip around obtaining certain photos, most photographers will be left feeling as if they've been transported to the most ideal photo location, but unable to get a photo to their liking in the rush to move on to the next destination. For these people, photography tours are the perfect solution, where the tour is designed with the photographer’s priorities in mind and often comes with specialised tuition and companions of likeminded interests.