Photo Booth or No Photo Booth?

A little background on our situation...

One of my many responsibilities at our dealership is to be in charge of our new and used vehicle photos. I have a guy who works for me that handles the job well, but it falls under my purview. As we all know, we have to be on top of our photos and videos as they are the first thing that most customers see when they view our inventory. Statistics tell us that the average shopper looks at anywhere from 11-18 dealers inventory before ever contacting the dealer, so the product we put out there is critical to business.

Our current practice is that we take the photos of our vehicles after our detail department gets done with them, upload them to our CRM and then put them on the lot. It is a full time job for my assistant and he does very well with it, however, right now we simply take the photos at the corner of the dealership.

This morning the Dealer Principle, a Sales Manager and myself sat in on a very impressive presentation on a photo booth with green screen walls and a turning platform. The setup allows you to take an entire exterior video in 52 seconds and then the software goes through the video and pulls out a still photo every at 10 degree turn. This gives you both an exterior video and still shots of the exterior in 52 seconds. That is significantly faster than we can do it without the equipment. They also have an option of a camera that can be mounted inside that rotates and follows the same process.

As you might imagine, the results from the controlled environment were excellent, but as with anything impressive, they come at a price.

I am curious about what you do, if you do your photos in-house. Do you just use your a corner of your lot (or some specific spot at your dealership) to take photos, or do you have a photo booth with the green screened walls? Maybe you just have an inside area where you take your photos. I am very interested in hearing your thoughts.

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Comment by steven chessin on October 23, 2016 at 9:18pm: My solution is very different : Let's talk about 50 cents per pic or about $ 5 per car !

I have done the 25 grand photo studio thing with an extreme high-end store - a pro set-up is great - but not applicable to 99.9% of dealers reading this. Price - speed - quality must be balanced so that not too much quality is sacrificed to achieve very consistent pro-ish results at a final cost of five-dollars per pic without any investment in studio - camera gear - editing gear - and HR to do it. The results for the price are good if pics are not displayed at incorrectly large sizing. At the larger sizes the lower resolution images (necessary for bulk uploading) will show diminished sharpness.

The RIGHT WAY (IMHO) --- is as follows :

Higher a professional (I can name several privately) field production services company for "data media collection) and they will use a good (not great) camera suited to the mid-sized photos displayed - they will move the car to the best outside placement - away from any other cars or background - they will take the satisfactory 9-15 photos - and here comes the kicker ---- they will PHOTOSHOP the exterior pics to place the car into your showroom - or - the showroom of your choice (from a library of showrooms) and shoot the interior carefully enough to not show through the windows.

A typical photo session will yield about 1 car per 5 minutes when a porter is assisting with the heavy-lifting of moving the cars.And --- the cars to be shot should have been given a power-wash shower in the morning of their scheduled shoot. Then it takes 3-5 days to post-produce the pics so a few temp pics are uploaded.

This --- has nothing to do with the right kind of video - but will provide the material for the temp fake video. The proper video is another subject.

One last point --- when using this technique - the results from the SRPs (search results pages) is so surprisingly better -- from the dealer site and export-sites - that this one benefit alone - makes this my choice. So yes -- I have "been there - and - done that" with the high-end approach - but the effort and cost for the premium results are far too in excessive when they can be cheaply approximated using modern technology,

Baaammm ! Now the playing field is leveled so the independent Mom+Pop can complete with the big boys !

And if you want more tricks for competing with the major leaguers - message me - or they will squeeze the small stores out-of-business. Or -- go ahead and buy a turntable and build a studio around it.

Comment by Mike Johnson on October 21, 2016 at 9:53am: Almost everyone does research online before they visit a dealership, and many times the first impression is the photo of a vehicle on the SRP or VDP page. The most difficult part of a photobooth is the lighting, and there are a lot of turnkey solutions out there with poor lighting. Luckily I made all the mistakes already and I have the formula to give you.

1) find a 25/x30' minimum area, that is smooth and flat (use concrete leveler if needed), doesn't accumulate trash or dust, has easy entry / exit. and located near the exit of the detail bay.

2) You want lighting to be 5000 Kelvins, 130,000 lumens with 60% direct/diffused light (accomplished using a suspended chimera softbox) and 40% indirect light (using 5-10 250W LED continuous light panels that bounce light off an object like a wall or the ceiling).

3) Buy the other equipment including 1-2 samsung digital camera, HD computer monitor, a fixed camera stand, a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, a USB to DVI connector, a PC or Mac computer or laptop, a ricoh 360 cam and a flexible mini-stand, a CarTurner turntable, and grey garage floor paint and clear coat. 4) Option 1 is to order very large seamless white PVC panels (see Extrutech) and install them vertically side by side so they curve away from the wall at the bottom. Option 2 will create somewhat distracting lines and will be very hard to light properly but you simply paint the two corner walls where you want the booth white or grey. 6) Have the people at CarTurner install your turntable (they may hook you up if you mention my name but no promises) 7) Pick a photo management service. Some options not in any order are Spincar.com, EZ360, Autoxloo.com, Netdirector. Those are just the ones off the top of my head. We use EZ360 by Sister Tech and it takes great HD photos if you have a decent photographer on staff, our setup runs 24/7 if needed, however the app crashes a lot apparently, and the owner is a pain in the ass so get everything in writing and avoid him at all costs.

Excellent photos can be taken outside, but it typically requires axxxxx skilled $14-$20/hr photographer, and that person is restricted to taking photos during the 2-3 hours in the morning while the lighting is good. You want quality speed and consistency and you can get that without a booth by taking photos in the same spot, with the car angled the same, and hoping the light doesn't change too much as the seasons change. There is a point when your inventory gets too large and you need a booth to keep up with a sizeable inventory, which is only possible by taking photos at all times of the day. If you have one spot to take photos and it takes your photographer 45 minutes per car minimum. 3 hours of good light let you photograph 4-6 cars per day. So if your monthly inventory exceeds 88 cars you need to hire a weekend photographer

You can get away with looking like you have a photobooth with an app called spincar, which uses an iphone and/or a 360 ricoh theta camera. Whoever is doing the pictures would simply walk a full circle aIt will apply a custom looking background that appears as if the car is on a turntable in a booth. I also think their hotspots are a genius idea with some automation could be very useful. It's a very attractive deal for anyone that wants to get started immediately doing photos, but it's not a long term solution for us until they streamline the process a bit (i.e hotspots) and are able to match the image quality of other solutions.