Heath Riggs at Mono Design commissioned me to work with him to create a couple of advertising photographs for a campaign he was working on for Ferodo Brakes. The brief was to make two hero advertising photographs of a late model car, under hard braking avoiding a collision with a distracted pedestrian on a rainy night. The key message is that you can trust Ferodo Brakes if you really need to stop.

For safety reasons it was obvious that we would need to construct an image, as shooting a real-life emergency braking situation would be far too unsafe.

With this type of image-making, every detail is a choice and there are a series of decisions that need to be made to effectively tell the story. What model of car, who is the pedestrian and why are they on the road, where is this taking place and under what conditions? Before we could tell the full story, we needed to identify each of the necessary components required to convey this message at a glance.

The ingredients list we ended up with was a late-ish model gunmetal-grey Mercedes sedan, a teenage girl on her phone and a wet night in Hindley Street in Adelaide. We did a number of location reccies before we settled on the location. We then needed to get a permit to shoot in the city and to get the council to reserve a couple of parking spots which we needed to kept clear. Finding the right car proved difficult and Heath ended up contacting a man who was selling the car we wanted online and paid him to let us photograph it.

Once we had settled on the exact location, we waited for a night that was wet but not torrential. In preparation to establish the final composition, we photographed passing cars to establish how the placement of the car would look. Once we had seen a demo shot of a similar-sized car in roughly the right spot, we were satisfied we could make it all work and we used tabs of masking tape on the road to mark positions as a reference when photographing the car in the studio. Then we gathered measurements of everything we could. From the placement of the car and the relationship of the position of the pedestrian within the scene. We took a detailed set of measurements of camera height, camera relation to the angle of the road, and very importantly, the camera ISO settings and the focal length of the lens we were using. The inherent distortion of the wide angle lens needed to photograph the street must carry through in all of the components but especially the car photography. The car should be shot in a relative position within the frame to its position in the final image. We were able to shoot our teen model in situ during breaks in the passing traffic and used a wireless flash to imitate the low height of headlights.

With the street shot, we had our reference and were able to shoot the car. The car was photographed at Finch Studios in Mt Barker in the Adelaide hills. I am Finch Restorations' official car photographer which means I was very familiar with the studio and we got through both the side and rear three quarters in a morning. We replicated our camera orientation and lens settings from the street scene. It was imperative that the lighting of studio car photography appeared plausible as part of the conditions we were presenting as the final image. Once we fine-tuned the lighting state, we wet the car down and took the final photographs. I shoot a car in sections. I’ll light the parts of the car individually to gather enough detail in each area to build the lighting event I’m going for on the car. For these, I used four or five images of the various sections to create the final car photograph. Once the parts are seamlessly combined, I then cut the car out and it can be placed into the composite photograph.

This is an early rough working version of the composite.

In truth, this is about the halfway point in the job. Post-production is vast on a job like this as there is so much scope in which to improve the final photograph. My part of the post-production was to supply Heath with a clean photo of the car, pedestrian and street scene that all had a matching balance of contrast and colour.

The sky and the background of the street were highly modified. All branding was removed from the street, along with unwanted reflections and bollards. A passing car that was shot specifically, was dropped in and the seam repairs on the road and stray marks were tidied up.

Then it was onto the architectural photography component. We shot the building in the background as a separate photograph to the road so we could remove most of the footpath, foreshortening the proximity of the building and the car. We followed all of the same considerations of our measurements concerning the final image when shooting the background building so all of the parts could fit together. There was a huge cleanup of the building removing marks from windows, posters, people and signage. Once the cleanup was done, I then did perspective correction to straighten the vertical angle of the building. This is a really common correction in architectural photography as they are often shot with very wide-angle lenses that create distortion in the image.

Once the components looked cohesive, I sent them all to Heath and left him to fulfil his vision. He lowered the front of the car closer to the front wheel to emphasise the pitch of the car under brakes. He also created a tail light trail and generated water coming off the tyres to emphasise the appearance of movement. His key addition to the storytelling was a layer he made to look like heavy rain.

It was a time-consuming but very rewarding process. Heath and I have a long relationship making refined images for various applications, so the conversation about art direction is very open with the best idea winning. We share the same focus on working towards something really special.