Car photography question

What's entailed in getting glamour shots like this one? I assume it's a set up in a warehouse but what would it take to make something like this?

Uniform color background material that the car is parked on, and lots of lights.

BoxheadTim said:

Uniform color background material that the car is parked on, and lots of lights.

Otherwise referred to as a "studio".

1988RedT2 said:

Otherwise referred to as a "studio".

This.

The car was literally driven into a special studio; they are available for rental in major metro areas.

The floor is white, obviously, and instead of a 90-degree edge where the floor meets the wall, it's curved. It's called a cyclorama, cyclorama wall, "cyc," for short, or sweep. This way, you can't tell where the floor ends and the wall behind it begins. This approach is also used in product photography and human modeling, for the same reason but on a smaller scale: to nix the floor/wall intersection.

Next, add studio lighting. Depending on the look you're going for, this can be fairly straightforward, or very complex. The photographer lit this car primarily from above, to the side, and behind the RH corner. The blaze of white on the glass is actually the a large cloth diffusion material placed in front of a very powerful light. Based on the reflections in the rims, the photographer added either lighting or reflective elements to light them. They may have also separately lit the tires to get just the tread, then Photoshopped them in. (In fact, looking closely now, I see that the tires don't match.)

A reason why you'd need to rent a studio, in addition to the obvious one that it's a massive space you can drive a car into, is that it can take a ton of lighting, very heavy-duty grip gear to mount and control it, and massive diffusion material that photographers aren't going to own.

All that said, there are other ways to do this. Some photographers use a "light painting" technique, where they shine a small amount of light on a discrete part of the car, shoot, move, light, shoot, repeat, repeat, repeat, then stitch it all together. But time is money, and this car is for sale, so my bet is that they rolled it into the studio, dusted it off, lit from above/behind, shot the tires with speedlights, and called it a day.

The studio backdrop looks like this, but a lot bigger:

that's how you don't see a line between the flooring and the "wall" behind, it is all one piece.   

You can also do a surprising amount of work in post processing (Photoshop).  You don't necessarily need a studio and seamless background to get good results.

Example:

I could have easily edited out the window on the left side of this picture and added an industrial or warehouse background there.  Just having a background that's not too busy with a bunch of overlapping things makes it fairly easy to edit.  Yeah a studio is ideal but not at all needed for good results.

For some tips on automotive photography that doesn't involve a studio, we have this on the site: 

How to push your car photos to the pro level with StanceWorks' Mike Burroughs

We built a photo studio complete with turntable. It was expensive.  It is very nice. 

If you scroll down this page to the images you can manipulate you can see the room

https://www.hauglandcollection.com/1959-abarth-750-zagato-double-bubble/

We built it to document builds and collections, but where it really shines is photos for bringatrailer auctions.  Cars will sell for 20%+ more than comparable examples with outdoor photos. 

Something else more basic than the studio and lights etc is having a tripod, stopping the lens down to give plenty of sharpness and depth of field, while using low in-camera sensitivity (aka ISO) to allow for cleaner images.  This way you can let the camera expose the shot for as long as is required for proper exposure without needing to worry about camera movement like you would holding the camera in your hand.

f8 and be there, etc