The auto industry has traditionally been one of the more lucrative markets in photography, but increasingly it’s being impacted by the introduction of computer generated imagery (CGI). Leading car photographers Carl Lyttle and Douglas Fisher decided to jump on board and founded Moofe, a new company dedicated to CGI, offering custom-shot imagery alongside plans for a stock photo service that provides pictures of locations with positioning co-ordinates and capture data.

Two years on, Lyttle remains convinced this is the future, and warns that it is already affecting more than car photographers – anyone shooting regular product pictures will soon struggle to make a living, he claims.

Faced with shrinking budgets, art buyers and agencies are turning to CGI houses to create computer modelled 3D images of their products, then going to libraries such as Moofe for their background shots. “The market is not commissioning photography like it used to,” says Lyttle. “We’ve seen a momentum shift in the last few months. Product photography is dying, and photographers are becoming technical directors. At the moment there are only a couple of dozen good CGI houses in the UK, but in a few years there’ll be hundreds. Everyone will need CGI.”

A typical CGI production model goes something like this: the retoucher starts with the initial backplate or 360° HDRI image, which has been cleaned up and colour corrected by whichever company has provided it. The retoucher tweaks the image to get the right look and feel, then places a 3D car model into the scene using software such as Autodesk’s Maya. The lighting, reflections and shadows of both elements are then matched, and the whole image given one last retouch. The advantage for clients is that they can make almost instant changes, such as the colour of a product, or the location it’s shown in, according to the taste of different markets.

Moofe has just gone live with its extensive library of background images, shot around the world and aimed initially at the car market. Some 30,000 are standard backplate images, but more than 1000 others are 360° high dynamic range (HDR) versions. Customers can download their chosen HDRI image, rotate it 360° and position it at any angle using 3D software.

“Moofe isn’t just a picture library, it’s an asset resource for 3D production,” explains Lyttle. “We ran the beta version for two years before launching, and we hope to double the number of HDRI backgrounds in the next three months.”

Moofe’s client list includes Renault, Toyota, Audi, Ford, BMW and Volvo, who according to Lyttle, all source their background content externally before doing their post-production in house. “Our photographers have to capture the same location from a number of angles using the Moofe cube [a device that helps capture positioning data] for scaling purposes and camera extraction for the CGI artists,” says Lyttle. “They’re briefed to shoot in this way, with a particular lens, to cover target-rich environments that make good car backgrounds. In post, we create the HDRI and make it clean and colour balanced, so the customer doesn’t have to do any of that.”

“We want to give buyers – automotive manufacturers, agencies, post-production houses – full creative control,” adds Eoin O’Connor, Moofe’s CEO and business brain. “By taking our model close to the commission route and giving our buyers as many choices as possible, we ensure they have more freedom.”

And while the automotive industry provides the majority of Moofe’s business so far, CGI is already cutting swathes into product photography. “Last year our biggest clients were a tyre manufacturer and a pharmaceutical company,” says O’Connor. Get ready for the next revolution in digital photography.