Back in June 2005, PDN ran a story that few car photographers have forgotten. The headline read, "Will CGI kill car photography?"

"It was something really hysterical," remembers New York-based car shooter Marc Andresen.

The much-touted killer was computer-generated imaging (CGI), a technology developed by Hollywood animators and refined by video game creators. Instead of building prototypes of new cars for hundreds of thousands of dollars and shipping them around the world to be photographed, manufacturers could just send the engineering data directly to a CGI rendering house. With a few clicks of the mouse, the electronic blueprints would be transformed into beasts of photorealistic chrome, rubber, leather and paint. Agencies would pick some pretty backgrounds to drop in, then work with the computer guys to create everything from brochures to rollout ads. Car shooters—and soon, it was feared, other product photographers—would be reduced to background snappers and lighting "consultants," or go out of business.

Two years after that article came out, CGI is now ubiquitous in advertising. While cars are still the most popular uses for the technology, CGI of other transportation vehicles, along with office furniture and even consumer products like cell phones are not uncommon. And yet the worst-case scenarios never came to pass: Most photographers have not only made peace with the technology, but embraced it.

"Frankly, I never believed that it would be the death of car photography, or that it would change the way we all do business," says Andresen. In addition to assignment work, he partners regularly with CGI houses such as Detroit's With a Twist Studios and Bloomfield Hills, Michigan's Armstrong White on jobs involving CGI. He also shoots landscapes for Goodstock, a company that licenses CGI-ready stock images from photographers."It's now as important to maintain relationships with various retouching and rendering companies as to different agencies and clients," Andresen explains.

Other photographers want to bring CGI capability in house for a competitive edge. One car shooter is teaming up with a photographer-turned-renderer because, he says, the big CGI houses often can't be bothered to help him put together bids. "I need to have more control," explains the photographer, who asked to remain anonymous.

London-based photographer Nigel Harniman jumped in with both feet two years ago. He now has a modeler, two renderers and a retoucher working for him under the name AIR-CGI. AIR stands for Automotive Image Rendering, but his group is already also handling CGI for other types of product photography.

Harniman recently shot a 2007 Ford Edge print campaign for JWT Detroit, which combined a traditional shoot with a CGI car placed in physics-defying contexts—balancing on a railing in one shot and atop a curving wall in another. "We approached the campaign with the same production values as a traditional shoot—makeup artists, stylists, location finders, catering, permits," Harniman says. "That's the way to complete briefed projects. CGI is not a magic pill. Computers can do wonderful things, but to produce a good image, you need the same components you've always needed, starting with a great premise."

The principals at the top rendering houses agree that photographers remain an intrinsic part of the process. "You absolutely cannot assume somebody else's craft," says Chuck White of Armstrong White, which just finished three CGI-based pieces for Infiniti with photographer Vic Huber. "He flew in here from L.A. and sat with our artist. Thanks to having a very high-end photographer and a client smart enough to have the budget and the mentality to keep him in the loop, we ended up with three magical pieces that didn't look like anything in our portfolio."

Christakis Christodoulou, director of the London postproduction house Saddington & Baynes, is adamant that "the last thing we'd do is tell photographers they're extraneous." The most photorealistic CGI shots always integrate traditional photographic elements, he says, and while the photographer's role in those cases is more like that of Hollywood's director of photography, it's no less important.

The technology, most agree, has nothing left to prove in the area of photorealism. What really excites White and Christodoulou are the things they can do with CGI that cannot be done in reality—the objects that can be conjured, the worlds that can be created whole cloth. "We're creating things that can't be done with traditional model making and photography," reports Christodoulou. For example, his company has created planes made of ice and ships made of Tide detergent. For client Cathay Pacific, Saddington & Baynes modeled eight historic aircraft and rendered them practically life-size for an airport runway display. It has also perfected a look that is deliberately both real and unreal, harkening back to classic illustration.

Says White: "We're over, 'Can you match a photograph?' We're into 'What new worlds can you create?'" Armstrong White has developed what it calls a "pre-vis" tool, pre-visualization software that can simulate a real live photograph, in real time, in three dimensions. White tells how his artists recently made a blowing, cloudlike scarf for fun in 3-D. "All of a sudden you had what looked like interesting silk shapes just flying around the vehicle in a dimensional space, like an outdoor sculpture that you can drive a car into and rotate around. It's a major, major paradigm shift, and it's where the fun is."

And where does a photographer fit into that fun? By thinking of potential images in a three-dimensional way, and by viewing the technology as liberating, not threatening.

"CGI is just another tool in the box," shrugs Harniman. (Remember when people were saying this repeatedly when Photoshop first came out?) "In some circumstances, it's the only way to do a job, and in others, it's allied with photography, and believe it or not, sometimes, photography is far better"