Car and Automotive Photography Distance Guide
A car photographed too close with a wide lens gets a swollen nose and a shrunken tail. It is the same near-and-far distortion that affects faces and pets, but easier to see on a long, rigid object with straight lines. Distance decides whether the car looks accurate and desirable or slightly wrong.
Where the exaggeration comes from
Things look bigger the nearer they are. In a three-quarter view of a 4.7 m sedan, the nose is about 3.3 m closer to you than the tail, so the nose looks larger than the tail by about 3.3 m divided by your distance. From 4 m that is 82 percent, from 8 m 41 percent, from 12 m 27 percent, from 15 m 22 percent, from 20 m 16 percent and from 30 m 11 percent. So the nose swells fast when you are close, and the effect only fades gently with distance.
How far for a hero shot
For a three-quarter shot, the car at 45 degrees occupies about 4.5 m of width across the frame. Allow it to fill 70 percent of the frame and the frame must be about 6.6 m wide for a sedan, so the distance is the focal length times 6.6 m divided by 36 mm. That gives:
| Lens (full frame) | Distance for a sedan, three-quarter |
|---|---|
| 35 mm | 6.4 m |
| 50 mm | 9.2 m |
| 85 mm | 15.6 m |
| 105 mm | 19.3 m |
| 135 mm | 24.8 m |
That is why 85 to 105 mm from 15 to 20 m is the usual professional hero shot: the nose exaggeration is down to about 16 to 22 percent. A 35 mm lens from 6.4 m frames the same car but exaggerates the nose by about 50 percent. For other vehicles, scale the distance with length: about 14 m for a compact with an 85 mm, 16.5 m for an SUV and 19 m for a long van or pickup.
Side profile
In a true side-on view, the nose and tail are at the same distance, so there is no nose-versus-tail exaggeration at all. What happens instead is that the ends of the car sit off-axis, and a wide lens stretches things near the edges of the frame. The wheels at the ends become ovals. Standing 4 m away, the ends are about 30 degrees off axis and a wheel stretches by about 16 percent. At 6 m it is 7 percent, at 10 m under 3 percent, and at 15 m about 1 percent. So a profile wants about 10 m or more. A sedan filling 70 percent of the frame needs about 9 m with a 50 mm lens, 16 m with an 85 mm and 20 m with a 105 mm.
Details
Badges, wheels, headlights and stitching tempt you to go wide and close, but curved surfaces such as a wheel arch or a headlight exaggerate quickly, since the part nearest the lens is so much nearer than the rest. A 90 to 105 mm macro lens from 0.5 to 0.8 m gives cleaner results. A 15 cm wide badge frame needs about 0.56 m with a 90 mm lens. The same principle is covered for small subjects in the food photography post.
Interiors
Inside a car you have no choice but a wide lens, around 16 to 24 mm from 0.5 to 1.5 m, and some distortion is unavoidable. Keep the dashboard and wheel away from the edges of the frame, where stretching is strongest, as in the table in the lens compression post.
Rolling shots
Photographing a car in motion is the one situation where safety matters more than framing. Shooting from a following vehicle needs professional rigging, closed roads or a controlled site, and experienced drivers, so it is not something to try in traffic. The safer options are a panning shot from the roadside, 3 to 6 m back from the edge of the road, or a shot from an elevated position such as a bridge, 5 to 15 m away, with a 70-200 mm lens. For a pan, the background streak on the sensor is the speed times the exposure time times the focal length divided by the distance. A car at 60 km/h (17 m/s), 10 m away, with a 100 mm lens at 1/60 s, gives about 2.8 mm of streak, around 8 percent of the frame width. Slower shutter speeds give more streaking and take more practice, and the motion blur post covers the technique.
Tight spaces
In a driveway or small studio you may have under 5 m. There, use the widest lens you must, accept some exaggeration, or shoot details and interiors instead. From 5 to 10 m, a 35 to 50 mm lens works for a three-quarter view with moderate exaggeration. Beyond 10 m, the full range of flattering distances is open. Whatever the space, the nose exaggeration is simply about 3.3 m divided by the distance, so you can judge the trade-off for yourself.
To check how far away you were in a car photograph, enter the car's known length in the calculator.
Related reading: Architecture Photography: Distance, Perspective, and Distortion, Telephoto Compression: How Distance Changes Your Background, Subject Distance Calculator.