Virtual Car Photography Has Never Looked More Real

Photography by Michael Banovsky

I’ve been playing video games since the early days, and of course, watching my favorite vehicles ever more incredibly rendered each year has been amazing to behold.

It used to be that there was barely enough memory to get a red blob from start to finish, with a few dozen turns in between. Now, virtual cars are defined with enough computing power to run a row of Sega Outrun cabinets. This has also allowed for game designers to become more creative and add features in order to appeal to a wider audience. Gran Turismo 4 was the first game to have this feature, and it’s something that’s appealed to me from the start.

This may sound silly, but with graphics as good as they are now, there’s a surprising amount of fun to be had in composing an interesting photo in a video game. I also find it oddly relaxing, which it should—after all, I’m just tapping buttons to compose virtual thoroughbreds into an interesting photo. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been taking quite a few in-game photos to see how real Forza 6 photography can get, and the results are pretty good.

Even with a small amount of post-processing applied, and the images cropped to the same size: what do you think? And are you a player who enjoys virtual “photo modes”?