BMW Art Car

With the upcoming Concorso d’Eleganza at the Villa d’Este in Italy. We look back at our photoshoot for the 2015 edition of the Concorso d’Eleganza. For the press images I travelled to Munich to meet up with A. Lange & Söhne for the BMW Art Car photoshoot. Being the main partner for the event since 2012, A. Lange & Söhne created an exclusive ‘Como Edition’ of the Lange 1 Time Zone for the winner in the category ‘best of show’. This special model features the Como on the city ring and a special hand-engraved casebook. It displays the coat of arms of the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este.

Original visuals

Prior to the photoshoot (at that time it was still unsure what car would be used) ideas had been visualised and discussed. So beforehand there was a global idea of what we would be going to create and how the setup would have to be. The focus would have to be on the watch, being the most important object in the images. Yet the background would have to be recognisable. Maybe not to everybody, but the enthusiast would have to recognise the background subject straight away.

BMW Art Car at BMW Welt in Munich

At the day of the shoot we meet up at the BMW Welt and find our way to the basement of the museum. Here we find three amazing 70’s BMW art cars on display, hard to imagine these actually raced the tracks back in the days.

Side-by-side we see the Alexander Calder BMW 3.0CSL from 1975. Frank Stella’s coupé from 1976 and the 1977 320i designed by Roy Lichtenstein. Looking at the BMW art cars we decided to use Frank Stella’s car. With the requirements of an recognisable background this is the design that would fit the photoshoot best. Otherwise it would possibly only have been recognisable to true connaisseurs.

Setup for photoshoot

Where you can do pretty much anything in a studio, when shooting on location can make some shots quite difficult. Add museum grade cars that are in a fixed position and you will understand there are certain problems we had to work around. Not being able to move the cars it was a challenge to get the right shots. Positioning yourself in-between less than half a meter of free space, add a tripod/camera combo and studio lighting to that and you’ll probably get an idea of what it was like.

Test shots for finetuning with the BMW Art Car

During the day we worked our way from the global visualisations to the final setup. Doing some test shots at first, trying some adjustments to see what works best. Followed by more testshots, minor adjustments, different angles and directions of lighting etc. After a full day of shooting with the BMW Art Car we finished just before the museum closed it’s doors, going home with a bunch of images for processing and editing.

Final PRESS Photos © A. Lange & Söhne

The final images have been used for a press release (PDF opens in new page) in the news section on the A. Lange & Söhne website.