Nearly all the pictures on this site have been sent in by the owners of the cars. Most are now submitted as shots taken with a digital camera. Digital cameras have gotten better and better throughout the years. Your standard $200 or $350 digital camera can take some pretty great pictures. Before you take pictures of your car, please stop and think about the following tips and examples. If the pictures are really poor quality, we will not post them.

1. Set your camera to take pictures no smaller than 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels tall size. This is about the 1.2Meg file size. Do not use anything smaller than the 800 by 600 (VGA) mode. They will be too small. My staff edits all the pictures on this site. We will crop and reduce the size of your pictures before posting them. Small pictures can get even smaller after we crop them. (Example of a small picture with an even smaller car.)

2. Turn off the on-picture date and time functions. These look bad and we try to edit them off.

3. Do not edit the images. Leave them in BMP or high resolution JPG form. When you edit the pictures, they lose crispness and color levels. Leave the editing to us please.

4. Pull your car out of the garage! You would not believe the number of pictures we get of nice looking GTOs in the garage. The lighting sucks. The entire car is usually not in the shot. Pull your car out of the garage before taking the picture! Your picture will be viewed by thousands each month. We want to see it in your driveway.

5. Make sure there are no shadows on the car. Don't park under trees if the sun is out. Get away from shadows cast from buildings, poles, and even yourself.

6. Try to get the sun at your back or nearly straight overhead. Don't shoot after sunset.

7. Carefully study the image in your viewfinder before taking the picture.

• BACK UP. Make sure the entire car is in the image. In fact, put some space all around the car in your viewfinder. The camera lens will try to flatten out the scene in front of you so that it all fits on a flat image. It will distort objects near the edge of the image. This is especially true of cameras with wide angle lenses. This is the biggest problem with images sent in from site visitors. BACK UP! (Example of a cool car, but the owner didn't back up!)
• Look at what's in the background. Are your trash cans out? Are your hose and car washing bucket in view? Is your garage door open and we can see all your junk in there? Is there another car in the background that is a brighter color than yours? Is there garbage on the ground? Is your son behind the car picking his nose? Look at the setting and fix what you can or move to a different setting.
• Look for bright reflections of the sun. If you have a bright spot on the chrome or fender because of the sun's reflection, move a bit.
• Clean out your interior. Get rid of the jacket, cans on the floor, towels or seat covers, etc.