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ROAD PHOTOS: Transport Environments for Advertising and Marketing

Advertising cars to modern audiences means projecting drama, creativity and the aspirational qualities of the brand to successfully capture the attention of the buyer. Finding the perfect shot for car print advertisements is now easy thanks to BearStock. If you are looking for a multitude of environments or moods, then you have come to the right spot.

Whether you are looking for a coastal highway that promises the freedom of open road, a rugged country landscape to match a 4WD vehicle, or a unique cityscape that speaks to sophisticated urban-dwellers, we have a library of hi-res images to match your brief. Shots from dozens of unique locations have been carefully planned and researched to ensure that a full range of variations are available. Straight roads, curved streets, coastal drives, freeways, country tracks, bridges, tunnels, carparks and ramps all feature in the collection.

Further to these options you can search for a number of different road surfaces. With Bear Stock you can pick from tarmac, asphalt, bitumen gravel, earth, sand and concrete. Road and landscape images have been shot at dawn, daytime, dusk and at night with any number of weather conditions – wet, dry, sunny, and overcast. The high resolution images for car advertising have been shot by photographers who understand the industry. As such, all files are 16 bit tiffs between 120 to 235 Mb in size, ready for rendering automotive CGI mesh models into the back plates.

BearStock allows you to request ‘exclusive rights’ for your chosen image so you can protect your image and the look and feel of your campaign or brand identity. Bear Stock captures dozens of road photos every year. If you like what you see and want to be first in line to see our collections then please sign up for our newsletter so we can send you our latest updates as they become available.

For more information, contact info(AT)bearstock.com or
phone + 61 (0) 412 569366 to speak with Josie for further enquiries.

 

ADVERTISING: Creative Print Ads for Cars Use Great Environments

One of the toughest categories to work on? Cars. Genuine product differentiation can be very difficult, but finding a unique selling point is a vital part of telling the advertising story. While it can seem that virtually every positioning platform or advertising idea has been done before, often inspiration can start with an incomparable background or setting.

BearStock produces photographic environments designed to be used with 3D models, 2D images or on their own. These ‘roadscapes’ have been specifically created to provide a unique or dramatic setting to almost any vehicle. The creative process starts with location scouting. From coastal roads in New Zealand to the red earth of the Australian outback, BearStock produces shots that are on-trend and distinctive.

The hunt for pristine environments is one such movement. As the world becomes increasingly urbanized, finding highways that hug the ocean, free of housing and development is becoming increasingly difficult. BearStock photographers spend many hours looking for such breath-taking scenery. The resulting highway photography shots are perfect for campaigns looking to remind people of the freedom cars can deliver in contrast to their often gridlocked lives.

Distinctive to the photographs on BearStock is the composition for height and angles. While many stock image sources will offer striking landscapes and road images, they are often unsuitable for the ‘beauty angles’ that suit the way cars are shot.

Specific viewpoints to the road are needed to make the most of a car’s natural lines. Shots are taken wider and at a higher-resolution to allow CGI models to be moved around within the background and for greater media usage. This approach means BearStock shots can be used for double-page spreads without the need to further clone extra surroundings or backgrounds.

For custom briefings, contact info(AT)bearstock.com or
phone + 61 (0) 412 569366 to speak with Josie for further enquiries.

 

BEST ROAD PHOTOS: Taking Images the Extra Mile

Car advertising trends change almost as rapidly as the development of the cars themselves.

Location makes up a significant proportion of the promise that is made to consumers when they visualise themselves driving a car, so it is important that this element is just right. Consumers want to see locations that remind them of perfect holidays, play to their sense of style or the status they wish to project. Just like food photography, roads and locations also need to be made palatable and desirable. With the car as the main ingredient, the location must complement the flavor of the advertisement.

BearStock’s images are completely retouched, stylized and graded so that they are ‘art ready’ and can be used in an instant by art teams either stand-alone or with a CGI rendered car model. Importantly, given the company’s industry experience, images are cleansed of all ugly street clutter. Sign posts, traffic lights, telegraph poles, graffiti and even chewing gum marks and cigarettes are all removed to ensure the shots look clean and crisp and don’t distract from the hero element of the car. That said, on occasion BearStock also provides perfect grungy, dirty city alleys as well!

Another reason for this digital makeover is the need to remove scale. By doing so, art teams have greater freedom to further alter images. For example, turning a two lane road into a single lane to increase focus on a car can be done without forcing perspective or disrupting the scale. The removal of words and numbers means that the majority of roads have been retouched so that they can be flipped to work in both left and right-hand-drive markets.

If necessary, roads, footpaths, guard rails, lane marking and damaged structure or architecture is ‘repaired’ digitally to bring symmetry and continuity to shots. BearStock’s process aims to balance the elements within the picture and create compositions with equilibrium and appealing geometry so that they frame the car to create a great ad.

For more information, contact info@bearstock.com or
phone + 61 (0) 412 569366 to speak with Josie for further enquiries.

 

HDRI: HDR Photography of Roads and Locations

Given we know that cars are reflective and metallic, the human eye looks for this quality when we see them. So, when we create digital cars and ‘place’ them in a real world back plate, certain techniques need to be employed to trick the brain. To do this, 360° high dynamic range image ‘domes’ are shot on location to capture the environment data.

Essentially, these additional 360° files accompany a select amount of background images to assist the retouchers and the creative department with the lighting and reflection references that need to be rendered onto the 3D or CGI mesh model. So, for example if a silver car needs to reflect an intricate urban architecture in its metallic panels, its windscreen and side mirrors, the HDRI ensures a seamless marriage between both elements of the advertisement.

The camera and lens information used at the shoot is also captured in the metadata of the HDRI dome images so that the post-production team can adjust the model and determine the height of the CGI model.

Retouchers, 3D artists or creative can also use the HDRI files to exert greater control over how much detail is shown in the reflections by manipulating the detail captured at different levels. This is the same process that photographers (that have taken their own HDR images for programs like Photomatix) use to play with exposure and maximize as many image details as possible.

BearStock provides its 360° HDRI file as a 32 bit radiance ‘.hdr’ file at 13,000 x 6,500 pixels in size. This provides a great level of realism and latitude of grey tones. This accompanied with the 16bit background file means there is plenty of scope for you to play with. Given most external output printers are only at 8 bit, the true 16 bit assets you can purchase from BearStock mean your images are superior in colour and density. Starting with more picture information means better results throughout production.

For more information, contact info(AT)bearstock.com or
phone + 61 (0) 412 569366 to speak with Josie for further enquiries.

 

OTHER USES FOR ROADSCAPES:Different Products, Art, Film and Marketing

It’s not just car print advertisements that have utilised the imagery available at Bear Stock. The images have been used for many other commercial purposes, including tyre ads, tourism, and book covers.

One need only look one of Australia’s great artists Jeffrey Smart, to realise that for many there is great artistic value in modernist depictions of urban landscapes. The images on BearStock, much like Smart’s unique, almost hyper-realistic pictures depict the beauty of the built environment we know well.

Filmmakers have also found many of the images useful for matte paintings to help create new worlds in the digital space whether it is for a feature or a television commercial. Like those who have selected images for bookcover art, many of the images are very dramatic and lend themselves to the telling of a story.

Beyond the mainstay of roads and landscapes, BearStock also features some other photographic sets, including seascapes, skies, still life, urbanscapes, landscapes and a range of conceptual images to help illustrate ideas and metaphors.

If you would like to license an image for any of the above purposes, simply fill in our online request form or contact us directly and we can help you.

For more information, contact info(AT)bearstock.com or
phone + 61 (0) 412 569366 to speak with Josie for further enquiries.