The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) is a US nonprofit that researches vehicle safety on behalf of car insurance companies. Here’s a 5-minute behind-the-scenes video showing how the organization photographs its respected and widely publicized crash tests.
The crash tests (and shoots) are carried out in a giant crash hall that was designed with photography in mind. There are high ceilings and a massive custom-built lighting array that puts out 750,000 watts of soft diffuse light.
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“It’s important that our light doesn’t cast hard shadows and reflections,” says IIHS VP Pini Kalnite, “and it has to be very bright for our state-of-the-art digital imagers, or slow-motion cameras.”
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In addition to shooting the crashes from multiple angles with high-speed cameras for super-slow-motion footage and with car-mounted cameras for in-cabin views, the IIHS also brings out high-resolution Hasselblad cameras for still photos of crashed cars.
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All the footage and photos are used to understand exactly what happens in each crash test and to communicate the findings to the media and public.
Image credits: Video and still frames by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety
from PetaPixel https://petapixel.com/2019/01/30/crash-test-photography-an-inside-look-at-shooting-car-safety-tests/
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