Photography
Northline Autos — twelve cars, one light
Dealer inventory shots that stopped looking like dealer inventory shots.
- Client
- Northline Autos
- Year
- 2025
- Role
- Photography, edit, template system
- Stack
- Canon R6, 24-70mm, Lightroom presets
- 11 min Per car, down from 40
- 12/wk Cars shot
- 1 Light
01 The brief
Twelve used cars a week, photographed in a gravel lot under a flat grey sky, going up on a listing site where every competitor has the same flat grey sky.
02 The brainstorm
The constraint was time: whatever I designed had to be repeatable by a salesperson with a phone after I left.
So the idea could not be a look that depends on me. It had to be a rule. We tested three: golden-hour only (unreliable in this climate), a portable backdrop (too slow), and one fixed position against the workshop's black wall with a single light on a stand.
The black wall won because it does two things at once — it kills the sky problem and it makes every car in the inventory look like it belongs to the same brand.
03 The build
Marked two floor positions in tape, set the light height once, wrote a one-page card with the three angles and the exact camera settings. Built two Lightroom presets so exports match whether it is my camera or a phone.
04 The result
Listing photos now take eleven minutes per car instead of forty. Click-through on their marketplace listings rose noticeably, and their paid social finally had a consistent image library to draw from.
