Car Design News launched 'Studio Photos', an extensive new library of high quality car photos taken in a photography studio. Developed in conjunction with automotive design research consultancy Car Men, it is a unique CDN member service created specifically as a visual benchmarking tool for design studios and consultancies who require directly comparable photos of production cars.
Most designers or researchers will be familiar with the task of quickly finding good images of specific cars, details of some new model's tail lamp, or the side view of a particular class-leading competitor. Being able to compare vehicles or details by viewing the same image type for several different cars is a really
useful feature of this new library, as is being able to demonstrate what is feasible to engineers, check in-house proposals are not derivative, or show how advanced a design theme is relative to the same type of cars on the market.
Essentially, Studio Photos is a large library of car photographs taken in the same studio on the same camera, from the same angles of exclusively silver cars, to be always directly comparable. Presented with a seamless white background (so that the images are literally only of the cars), the
photos are considered from a designer's perspective too, rather than the exaggerated views often seen in press packs or magazines. All of the major new European market production cars are photographed at a rate of two per month - the 2007 Mini is the latest addition. Photos can be purchased online and are then downloaded immediately at an introductory price of 50 Euros per photo. After purchase, the files are delivered to your Inbox in Studio Photos and each set can be downloaded as a Zip file.
There are currently 61 cars with 8 photos comprising 5 exterior and 3 interior shots at a
size of 2048x1536 pixels (0.5-1MB file size). These images can be printed in high quality up to around 500mm wide, used as part of a full-size projection presentation, or zoomed in to present detail design elements.
You'll find Studio Photos on the CDN home page under a new tab in the navigation bar entitled 'Photos'. This links to three photo databases:
- Studio Photos: a unique library of high quality photos. Available for purchase online for CDN members only
- Photo Galleries: CDN's collection of over 15,000 photos of cars and car details from the major auto shows from 2000-2007. CDN members can view and download photos at 1600x1200 size.
- Image Search: Advanced search tool that allows you to search for specific images, makes and models from CDN's huge database of images.
