Welcome to 500px!

This temporary Starter account, Explorer, was
automatically created for you.

A Starter account can do almost everything a normal account can do such as Liking and Favoriting photos, but it will expire after a while.

To rename this account and keep it for yourself just enter your email address in the header dropdown above.

It's that easy.

Fabian Oefner / Stories

A A A

Making of "Mercedes. 1545 parts."

Published March 30th, 2012

The image was made as a part of an ad campaign for Hexagon Metrology, a leading company in the world of industrial metrology.

The idea behind the campaign was to show different products as an exploded view photograph, explaining to the customer that with a product of Hexagon Metrology, you can measure every single piece of a car, airplane or wind mill.

For this image i took apart a very detailed scale model of a Mercedes SLR 300 Uhlenhaut (manufacturer: CMC). then i placed every single piece in the correct position, took a picture of it and reassembled the whole car in photoshop. piece by piece. from the body shell to the tiny little screws. it took me almost 3 days to shoot all the parts and assemble them.
but once you got the lights set, its a pretty straight-forward process: placing the part, shooting directly to the computer, masking the part in photoshop and place it in the right position. repeat it several hundred times, and the image is done.

Model Car Layout

Some of the parts after disassembly. The whole disassembly took more than a day due to the complexity of the model.

Basic Layout

Experimenting with the position and angle of the main parts.

Single Part: Seat

After the angle of the shot and the light was set, each single part was placed in position and photographed. The wheels in the image act as a reference for reassembling the individual parts in photoshop.