We see her in the distance, shimmering in the changing light. As she
moves closer, individual shapes become more apparent, more enticing. The play of light and
shadow across her smooth and silky skin is so inviting, as the lens caresses every line
and curve of her elegant, youthful body.
Welcome to a car commercial. You could
change the gender and a few of the adjectives and make the subject masculine, but the
purpose would be the same. Sex appeal. It sells and it's the main theme of most automobile
advertising in one way or another.
There are a lot of drop dead gorgeous car
commercials being seen on television today, but the art of lighting automobiles is nothing
new really. The art of lighting car bodies is as old as our understanding of how to paint
or draw photo-realistic images, which involves a thorough understanding of the interplay
of light and shadow on objects, textures and surfaces in the real world. Detroit
automotive designers there were using "the sheet", as it was called, at least as
early as the 1920's. The "sheet" was just that. A sheet of white muslin or
cotton which was held and moved by two or more people, while illustrators viewed the
subject, seeing where the reflections actually began and ended. Thus they could
realistically illustrate how an automobile would look, sitting outside, with nothing but
sky and sun above. This was later applied to press release photography and eventually
became an obvious tool for advertising photography.
Of course a good designer or illustrator could
also fairly easily predict where sky and horizon would meet on plane shapes, but the sheet
was a big help where curves were concerned. Later, certainly as early as late '40's or
early '50's, as compound curves became more common, the designers began using a very
large, overhead "bounce panel" as they called it. The bounce panel was a more
elaborate version of the sheet, where an entire design showroom was hung with muslin.
Ceiling fixtures protruded through the muslin, directing their light upward, to create a
huge bounce source which was large enough to wrap around the ever more complex shapes. Not
at all unlike a typical studio shot for modern cars. So the way automobiles are lighted
and photographed today isn't new, it's just perhaps a bit more refined and certainly more
excitingly photographed.
Modern automobile body design today is
described by designers as "tense", meaning the lines and curves change shape
often and thus create more unpredictable results where reflections are concerned. This is
because many complex shapes are being blended seamlessly, as though a membrane has been
smoothly prodded into one continuous, compound shape. These shapes provide very
unconventional reflective patterns and have given rise directly to the idea of
"liquid light", where the reflections flow continuously from one shape to the
next as the viewpoint changes, rather than starting or stopping or changing shape abruptly
where one surface ends and another begins.
My general approach to lighting a car is first
to think of the car as a large, complex mirror. Sort of like a Fun House mirror which
distorts lines and shapes. If you were to attempt to light a mirror, even a flat one, how
would you do it? The answer is, you can't. Light falling on a mirror is invisible. It is
the light falling on objects "reflected" in the mirror that is important. And if
the mirror is distorted, then the things it reflects can come from the craziest places.
These factors are what make car lighting such a challenge.
You can make a pretty good mirror by putting
something black behind a clear, shiny, reflective surface such as glass. If you place
anything with color behind the glass, it will absorb other colors and reduce the quality
of the reflection accordingly. If you put something white behind the glass you will all
but eliminate the surface reflection because the light will be so strongly reflected from
the white that the image on the surface of the glass will be washed out. This is the key
to understanding why a shiny black cars look so great when they have something to reflect
- the sky, other lights, anything bright.
