Photographing your own work.

The four mistakes

1. The same car more than once. Front three-quarter, rear three-quarter, a wheel, a door. You know it is four good photographs. A customer counts one car.
2. Close-ups that could be anything. A macro of a wing mirror or a door seal is a nice photograph and it says nothing about what you do. Somebody scanning at speed cannot tell what he is looking at, so he skips it.
3. Photographs of the wrong thing entirely. A showroom floor in a repair gallery. A stock photo of an engine nobody in your bay has touched. If a customer who knows the trade can spot that the picture is not your work, or not even your trade, every other claim on the page gets quieter.
4. A mix of eras and moods. A classic car at a show next to a modern truck in your bay. Individually fine. Together, it does not look like one shop’s month — it looks like a folder of pictures.

Six things that make the difference

• One car, one photograph. Six cars beats one car six ways, every time. If a job really deserves two, make the second one a genuine detail of the work — the line along the glass, the edge of the film — not another angle of the same panel.
• Shoot the whole vehicle. A stranger needs to recognize the kind of car. He is deciding whether you do cars like his.
• Same spot, same time of day. Pick one place outside the shop where the light is decent and use it every time. The consistency is what makes six phone photographs look like a set instead of a pile.
• Overcast beats sunshine. Hard sun blows out paint and puts your reflection in every panel. A grey day is a softbox.
• Get the background out. Bins, cones, the other customer’s car. Take two steps left. It is the cheapest improvement on this list.
• Before, from the same position as after. A before-and-after only works if the two photographs line up. Different angle, different distance, and it reads as a trick.

The bit most shops skip

Take the photograph before you hand the keys back. Once the car has gone it is gone, and “I’ll get one next time” is how a gallery ends up two years old.

Thirty seconds per car, one spot, one angle. Do it for a month and you will have twenty photographs of twenty different vehicles, which is worth more than any single professional shoot — because it proves the thing a customer actually wants proved, which is that cars go through your bay all the time.

Where they go

Your website, and your Google listing. The listing photos are the ones a stranger sees in the map box before he ever reaches your site, and a shop with three photographs from 2021 looks shut.

Written for independent auto repair and auto glass shops. If you read this and fix it yourself, that is a good outcome and I would rather that than sell you something you do not need.

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