Reflectors for car photography

[8bit]

I'm talking about the big round or oval, hand-held things, usually in 5-in-1 kits with various colours like silver, white, gold etc. I generally shoot with natural light and fairly often I want the car placed a certain way for the composition but the sun (or whatever the available light source is) may not be facing the right way. Not sure if even the bigger 4x3 foot items would be sufficient to provide a bit of fill light on the darker side of a car?

[eltawater]

I think you'd struggle under natural light conditions to get anything large enough to be effective without leaving a huge unwanted reflection as you'd need it to be really close? You could always grab one of those reflective windscreen shades and try the theory out.

Might be better off with a diffused flash instead as at least then you can direct it better?

[8bit]

Thanks for that. I didn't want to use a flash, specifically wanted to use a colour-neutral reflector light to maintain colours. I guess a reflector of the size I mentioned may still be useful for detail shots and they're not terribly expensive so I might give it a try but sounds like it's not worth banking on it being able to fill light a whole car.

[Rogue86]

Yeah I think if you scale-up how you would use a reflector for smaller items, you would need a giant one for a car - a studio wall effectively. Details would definitely work though, or smaller reflections for the lower/side of the car itself.

[8bit]

Cool, thanks for that!