Terpel: A Road Campaign From Night Driving to an Electric Charger

Five frames for Terpel covering the whole arc of a Colombian road trip - a tailgate with a mountain view, two night drives, a service station charging bay and a single car alone on a desert road.

Fuel and service-station brands have an unusual problem. The product is a commodity nobody has feelings about, the buildings are functional, and the moment of purchase takes four minutes and is mildly annoying. So the campaign is never about fuel. It is about the reason you needed it.

Terpel wanted the whole arc of a journey in five frames.

Two night interiors

The heart of the set is the driving. Both of those frames are lit almost entirely by the car itself - dashboard glow up onto the face, a little practical spill from the street, and just enough shaped fill to keep an eye readable.

Car interiors at night are one of my favourite lighting problems because the constraints are so tight. You cannot get a stand in there, the windows reflect everything, and any light that is too strong instantly looks like a film crew. The answer is almost always small sources hidden low, exposed so the face is the brightest thing in a very dark box.

One frame is a man alone in a leather jacket, jaw set, driving somewhere with purpose. The next is two women in the front seats mid-laugh. Same technique, completely opposite emotional register, which is what stops the pair reading as one idea shot twice.

The charger frame is the strategic one

The fourth image is a man at an electric charging bay under the canopy lights of a station. Commercially it is the most important picture in the campaign, because it is the one making an argument about where the company is going rather than what it currently sells.

I shot it at the blue hour with the canopy lights already on. That short window is the only time a service station looks good - the sky still holds colour, the fluorescents read as warm and welcoming rather than clinical, and the architecture stops looking like a petrol station and starts looking like a place you might want to stop.

“Nobody has feelings about fuel. They have feelings about the reason they needed it.”

Open at rest, close on distance

The set opens with a man sitting in an open tailgate looking at a valley - stationary, arrived, the payoff. It closes with a single car very small on a dirt road through arid country, which is the opposite: all distance, no destination.

Bracketing a campaign like that gives the middle frames somewhere to sit. Colombia makes it easy, because you can drive from cloud forest to desert in a morning, which is also what made the Delta Airlines work in Medellin and the kayaking series in Antioquia possible on tight schedules.