Good place for dead on front picture?

[GasSavers_maximilian]

I am going to write a program to compute the frontal area for my Accent from a digital photograph and I figure any picture I take will have more background separation issues than one I find online. Unfortunately I cannot seem to find a front picture that's dead on. They're either angled horizontally or a little vertically. Anyone know a good place to find such pictures? I'll keep looking. I guess a dead on rear picture should work too, right? Hard to see how they couldn't be the same!

[GasSavers_maximilian]

Looking for a rear photo yielded a pretty good one. It's taken from a slightly downward looking angle, but I think it'd be pretty good. No background, which is a big time saver. Need to get rid of that shadow though.

[theholycow]

Paint.net has a decent selection tool for cutting out the background.

[theholycow]

Oh, and you could park at the crest of a hill and take your picture with a blue sky background.

[GasSavers_maximilian]

I ran across that pic too, it's the 4-door. Should've mentioned it. The hill idea is great! Doesn't matter since the rear pic cleaned up easily in Photoshop. I've been too lazy to read the docs for an image loader library and just convert everything to the RAW format. Gets the job done.

[GasSavers_maximilian]

So 16.8064 sq ft seems to be the answer. Good thing the program was fast to write, since my back of the envelope calculation of the pixel counts was within 1% of the actual value! For scale I measured between the center of the circles of the rear signal lights. Raising the hatch got it out of the way, making this easy. Exactly 48", which was unexpected, but pleasing.

Does 16.8 sq ft seem reasonable for a small car? Feels low.

[GasSavers_maximilian]

There's a blueprint site that had the Hyundai Accent in it. More of a square view, so I'll rerun things with that. Easy to process as well.

Of course it yielded 21.8909 square feet, which is a lot more than the last one. Sounds more believable as well. Back of the envelope calculations from just the raw car measurements are close enough to 21.9 that I think I'm good to go. Not curious enough to figure out what was wrong with using the rear picture.

Wow, Gimp on os x really sucks. Really, really sucks. "How did they not notice how broken this is?" level of sucks.

[GasSavers_maximilian]

There's a native interface Gimp for os x. Not great (understatement), but at least usable. Hey, it's free! I was getting sick of going back and forth into Windows to use Photoshop.

[almightybmw]

hate to say it, but I read the title as "Good place for dead on front picture"

Now, I'm not one to judge, but I don't think we should have dead on the website's front picture. Doesn't really support what the site is about.

[GasSavers_maximilian]

I'd love to see your Rorschach test results!