My pre-flight checklists for automotive photo shoots are insanely predictble: Bodies and lenses, check. Strobes, wireless triggers, tripods, umbrellas and light modifiers, check. Ringflash, check. Extra batteries, etc., check. But on one occasion it dawned on me later that I should have packed a loaf of bread.

First, some backstory. Nearly three years ago my bosses at The Times-Picayune (which I left in September) asked me to write car reviews for the-then daily newspaper's Friday Automotive section. Each week I got to drive brand-new vehicles, including some of the world’s most expensive luxury and sports cars from Jaguar, Range Rover, Audi, BMW, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, et.al, plus heavy-metal-thunder muscle cars in the form of Corvettes, Vipers and Camaros.

The gig could have been worse.

As a journalist I had little problem lending my wiseguy and slightly gonzo, first-person experiential style of writing to my new beat. I simply put the reader in the passenger seat and took them along with me on sometimes wild, occasionally offbeat but largely interesting adventures. Whether careening across treacherous swamps or cruising through sexy urban nightscapes, screeching around race tracks or dishing out celebrity gossip during a tongue-in-cheek road trip to the Kentwood, La., hometown of Britney Spears, my readers always rode shotgun. And they never once asked to make a pit stop.

However, as a photographer, I decided from the get-go not to rely on generic and typically bland stock car images from automakers' websites for my Friday car page. My reason was simple: Keep it local. I knew readers would better connect with an image of, say, a Jeep Wrangler traversing downtown New Orleans or an instantly identifiable bayou of southeast Louisiana as opposed to the Rocky Mountains or a Nevada desert.

But with this also came a new set of demands. Automotive photography is a unique beast. Capturing the essence, personality and bodylines of a car may look easy, but truth be told it requires the eye of a movie location scout (without the right environment/background, you might as well pack it up and go home), keen off-camera lighting instincts, model-photography composition savvy, plus the overall photojournalist skills to turn a hunk of metal into an eye-catching, storytelling narrative in a single bound. And you do this not once but 52 times a year.

The pressure is always on, bucko.

No more so than the afternoon I took a BMW 650i coupe to the Mississippi Gulf Coast without so much as a clue as to where I would ultimately do the shoot. When I pulled into the gravel parking lot of a newly constructed pier in Bay St. Louis, Miss., and saw swarms of seagulls hovering overhead, I immediately knew that (1) this was the spot, and (2) I wanted the birds in the shot (the good news was I wouldn't need model releases). In most cases the cloudy gray-cast skies and warm tones of the foreground sand might have posed a problem considering the car was eggshell white -- the image ran the risk of winding up too monochromatic and too midtone-ish. But I had a hunch the seagulls might save the day if I could catch them in flight while hitting them with a quartet of speedlights at raw power with no diffusion.

But how would I draw the avians closer -- as in really close -- to the car? I doubled back to a local convenience store to purchase a simple remedy: a loaf of bread. Back at the pier, I instructed my wife to drive the Bimmer slowly along the gravel parking lot with the driver’s-side window down, tossing out pieces of bread until the birds began following her and the car. In the first shots it looked like a bone-chilling scene from "The Birds": the seagulls looked menancing if not downright frightful as they literally dive-bombed the car (and, it turned out, my wife's hand and arm). Not good.

It took a few laps around the parking lot before my strategy appeared to pay off in spades. From a short distance away, where I had fixed my bank of strobes, I finally snapped the shot (using a 70-200mm 2.8 lens) that we eventually wound up using on the automotive page. (Story headline: FLIGHT OF FANCY: BMW's twin-turbo 650i coupe swoops into our hearts)

On another occasion when I was test driving a Jeep Grand Cherokee, I got the crazy idea of shooting this luxuriously outfitted, safari-capable off-roader amid wild animals.

“How about Bourbon Street on a Saturday night,” a New Orleans friend suggested.

Instead, I called my friends at the Global Wildlife Center (www.globalwildlife.com) in Folsom, La., and asked them what I thought might be something out of the question: to shoot the Grand Cherokee in an open field surrounded by a herd of giraffes. To my surprise and delight the good people at the non-profit Global Wildlife Center said come on down.

I rode in an open-air, safari-like chaser truck behind a staffer who was driving the Grand Cherokee, as she positioned the vehicle in a wide swatch of field. Since we had coordinated the shoot to occur during feeding time, the driver held a bucket of dried corn outside the window (not visible to the camera) to lure the quartet of giraffes (that included a baby giraffe and the Global Wildlife Center's newest "arrival"). Shooting the giraffes in mid-day light under flat skies might have seemed a recipe for failure had I not packed an Interfit triple flash bracket (http://www.adorama.com/PAINT337.html) with an equal number of strobes that I had affixed with a Manfrotto Justin clamp to the side of my chaser vehicle. Since I was working without an assistant and there would be little time to futz with light settings once we started shooting, I simply set my bank of strobes for 1/1 manual mode (checking my captures every so often to make certain the illumination wasn't too hot).

Over the weekend when my 8-year-old nephew and godchild Tyler was looking over my shoulder when I was writing this post, he asked, "Are those real giraffes?"

Funny but that's precisely the same question my editor asked me.

Story headline: TALL ORDER: Grand Cherokee's new STR8 goes up against the big boys. (Click here to read the full story: http://blog.nola.com/auto_reviews/2011/09/tall_order_grand_cherokees_new.html).