Sure, I get to shoot a lot of cool cars. But the truth is my favorite automotive photo sessions haven’t been defined so much by the car I was testing as by the challenges (and fun) involved in creating an image of an automobile that is a story in and of itself. Working solo over the years without the benefit of a hifalutin production team, I’ve had to learn the ins and outs of everything from location scouting, permitting and styling to art directing, lighting and ultimately (gasp -- finally) snapping the shutter. Lots of trial and error along the way, to be sure, but also quite a few successes. Following are my Top 10 favorite auto shoots (in no particular order):

1. BORN TO BE WILD: Chevrolet Camaro 2SS Convertible

For the second year of the reintroduced Camaro, I wanted to create an image that spoke to the vehicle's rock-and-roll street cred. I remembered a cool girl that played rock guitar when I was growing up and decided to recreate my memory of her garage-band practices – but with the addition of a Camaro convertible. My versatile model Rebecca Jacob proved the perfect neighborhood rocker girl. She not only had the right look and wielded a Stratocaster like she was born with it, but she could also mimic Pete Townsend’s legendary “rabbit” jumps (see top photo, as it appeared with headlines in the newspaper). For lighting I used a quartet of Novatron model lights plus an equal number of off-camera strobes (including one placed directly behind Rebecca to create a stage-like lighting effect). The shoot in the warehouse lasted nearly six hours -- from hair styling and lighting set-up to when we actually finished shooting. A long day, to be sure, but it was among my most photographically satisfying shoots ever. All thanks to a fantastic model who knew how to rise – literally – to the occasion.

2. TALL ORDER: Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT8

What’s not to like about a car surrounded by a herd of giraffes (including the herd's newest addition)? The good people at the Global Wildlife Center (http://bit.ly/Y4mLVH) in Folsom, La., were kind enough to grant me access (supervised and guided, naturally) to the facility's free-roaming animals to shoot Jeep Grand Cherokee's top-tier SRT8. A staffer behind the wheel of the Grand Cherokee positioned the Jeep near the herd and rolled down the driver’s-side window to hand out food to draw the giraffes closer, as I rode in the back of a flatbed chaser vehicle. To illuminate a quartet of giraffes from this distance (and under fairly flat overhead skies) required affixing four off-camera Speedlights – all set on full 1/1 power -- to a nifty four-square swivel mount (http://bit.ly/ZOKhQV) that was clamped to the side of the chaser truck. As the giraffes began cruising the Grand Cherokee for corn during their impromptu “feeding time,” I began snapping away. We were done within 15 minutes. Even my typically non-plussed editor, when he saw the baby giraffe prancing behind the Grand Cherokee, let out an audible "aw-wwww." 

3. STAR-SPANGELED HAMMER: Corvette Grand Coupe GS Convertible

One day while cruising down Almonaster Boulevard in New Orleans, I spied a limestone quarry and for some crazy reason thought this might make a perfect backdrop to shoot the Corvette Grand Coupe convertible, among the last remaining born-in-the-USA, hammer-down muscle cars on the road today. After an informal five-minute telephone conversation with the quarry owner, I got the green light to use the venue. (In any other city but New Orleans, this process would have required four weeks, three lawyers, two meetings and at least one notarized insurance waiver). On the morning of the shoot I sheepishly maneuvered the Corvette in between ginormous, 20-foot-tall, heavy-duty quarry dump trucks. A few concerned drivers, obviously thinking I was either lost or insane, shouted through their rolled-down windows. “Don’t get run over!” When I spied the post-rain puddle in front of a limestone “hill,” I knew I had found the perfect spot. I strapped on my kneepads – limestone is killer on the knees, don’t you know -- and clicked away. The reflection of the Corvette in the puddle was pure lagniappe. Brilliant day.

4. ROLLING SCONE: Mini Cooper S Countryman

The Mini Cooper’s introduction of its first-ever four-door vehicle left me wondering if the oh-so-British automaker had lost its rock-’n-roll English cool. Could the Countryman sedan really share the same DNA as the two-door Mini that first earned its street cred 45 years ago as the pet car among the young and hip, Swinging ’60s London set? Of this I was certain: I aimed to flood the little sucker with enough off-camera strobes so that it resembled a red-carpet diva at a London movie premiere, utilizing New Orleans’ skyline at “blue-hour” dusk as my backdrop. The four-door Countryman may never worm its way into my A-list of Mini cool, but for one brief shining moment – 15 minutes at Algiers Point during a clear-sky evening, to be precise – it sure looked like a winner.

5. FLIGHT OF FANCY: BMW 650i Twin-Turbo

Despite appearances, this image has nothing to do with the song, “Close to You,” where “birds suddenly appear” every time the BMW 650i is near (but it would make for a great ad!). No, it took a little finagling to get this flock of prima donnas on the set. Lure du jour? A loaf of bread. I instructed my wife to drive the Bimmer slowly along the sand and gravel parking lot at a Bay St. Louis, Miss., pier, with the driver’s-side window down, tossing out pieces of bread until the birds began following her and the car. The first few shots looked like a bone-chilling scene from "The Birds": the seagulls 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 (remind me to nominate my wife for sainthood) before my strategy paid off in spades. From a short distance away, where I had fixed my bank of strobes, I snapped the shot (using a 70-200mm 2.8 lens) that we ultimately wound up using for the newpaper’s automotive page. Sometimes a little ingenuity can help a simple idea take flight (sorry, couldn’t resist).

6. BUSH LEAGUE: NIssan Xterra Pro-4X

I love shooting cars at the Bonnet Carré Spillway, an engineering marvel of flood gates that can open to take in the rising waters of the Mississippi when river tides reach dangerous levels. When not in use (which is most of the year), the Spillway is a public playground of wide open spaces popular among off-roaders and the like. When I shot the Nissan Xterra at sunrise, I specifically wanted to capture what to me was among the SUV’s coolest features -- its roof rail-mounted trail lights – to imbue the vehicle with the kind of rugged adventurousness for which it is well equipped. After finding the right angle and position, I parked the Xterra on a sloping levee batture and set to work setting up a tripod with three off-camera strobes (camera left, at the top of the levee, aimed down toward the vehicle) to enhance the grass already illuminated by the trail lights. When I set to work shooting, I hadn’t realized just how much the vast expanse just behind the Xterra reminded of the Africa's subtropical savannahs. Talk about luck! 

7. TERRAIN-SPOTTING: Range Rover HSE

I was heading to the bucolic fishing villages of Yscloskey and Shell Beach in eastern St. Bernard Parish for an early morning photo shoot with my Range Rover HSE test car, when I caught a glimpse of a sunrise red sky down a levee road. I slammed on the brakes and doubled back, not even knowing if the levee road was open to the public since there was a pumping station about 100 yards away. All I knew for certain was the pearl-grey Range Rover would pop like crazy against nature’s color palette of surrounding green grass and, in the distance, a melting-sorbet sunrise sky. But sky colors change rapidly – far faster in the morning than the evening, I learned – so I knew I had to work fast. With time of the essence, I opted to wing the shoot with only one off-camera strobe – positioned on the ground by the front-passenger tire and aimed back towards the car to illuminate the grass to the vehicle’s right, plus to add a little under-chassis contrast. I intentionally composed the shot so the Range Rover would be right of center, this so the gravel road would start in the right hand of the frame and sweep towards the left in the photograph as the eye followed toward the horizon line. I did all of this in under two minutes -- literally. Good thing, too. By the time I stowed my camera gear and began backing up off the levee road, the light had already changed to something far less dramatic. By the time I got to Shell Beach, I looked up at the now comparatively dullish sky and didn’t even bother taking out my camera. I had my shot. Lesson: strike while the sky is hot.

8. TOTALLY, DUNE!: Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo

Shooting a car on a beach at sunset is rich with opportunities to screw it up royally. You’re fighting against one of the most highly reflective and thus photographically difficult and unforgiving surfaces known to shooters -- sand. This while trying to adjust your camera’s light meter to balance otherwise bright sand and a setting-sun blue sky in such a way that the sky doesn’t fall into black. You mutter, “Why do I torture myself this way?” Here’s why: if you wait patiently for the ambient sunlight to wane sufficiently, the sand becomes your friend -- textured and surprisingly subtle, not merely a monolithic block of white-hot reflective light. Adding to the challenge of this shoot was figuring out how best to utilize off-camera strobes to enhance – not compete with – the setting sun’s gorgeous natural light on a beach. Solution? Three strobes – each on a tripod and diffused with a light shaper – placed at the six-, nine- and three-o-clock positions. Since I wanted this famous off-roader to look as though it were traversing a rugged sandy hill, I took the Grand Cherokee out of 4x4 mode and gunned the engine so the tires would sink ever so slightly into the sand, as I turned the front wheels to create the expectation of movement. Then I hunkered behind a sandy knoll on my belly and composed the upward-angled image as though from the POV of a sand crab. Sand and sky are balanced. What a beach!

9. CAT SCRATCH FEVER: Jaguar XFR

Challenge: Shoot a Jaguar at a deluxe New Orleans hotel at 2 a.m. – the pre-arranged time hotel management told you to show up because there would be no guests arriving for at least five hours. You show up at 2 a.m. only to be informed by night staff that a transport van of good-old-boy conventioneers en route from Mississippi will be arriving in – hello!? – 30 minutes. Crap! Time to shift into DEFCON 1. With an elegant, New Orleans-style mix of background gaslamps and foreground flagstones, I was determined to make this hotel’s sophisticated entryway fit hand in glove with my equally luxurious, black-clad Jaguar XFR test car. Stress doesn’t even begin to describe my emotions during the 25 minutes I scrambled to set up my lighting (a quartet of strategically situated off-camera strobes, banked to illuminate the hotel’s beautiful exterior plaster walls and textured flagstones) and compose my shot to maximize the “river” of diagonal lines leading to the Jaguar. With only five minutes remaining to shoot the scene, I worked like a Tasmanian Devil in overdrive. By the time I was stowing my gear in the trunk, the van pulled up. Just in the nick of time. All in a night’s work.

10. BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER: Nissan Pathfinder

In my review of Nissan's stalwart Pathfinder, I confessed how the vehicle was this sports-car lover’s first-ever SUV, purchased in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as an “evacuation car” should we ever face a smiliar catastrophe in the future. And we New Orleanians were dead certain we would. Good thing we weren’t all a little crazy back then. On the day I took my Pathfinder test vehicle to the West End boat launch after several days of heavy rains to scout for a photo shoot location, I was surprised to see how much of the ramp was underwater. I drove the Pathfinder out on the ramp as far as I dared and got out to take a look. Damn, I thought, it looks as though it's floating on water -- or on top of a sheet of ice. I set up a tripod with a pair of off-camera strobes in the water (but still on the ramp) directly behind the driver's-side rear wheel to pop a little reflection in the water to add more contrast to the undercarriage. (Caution: Don't try this at home unless you're willing to lose a couple of Speedlights in the drink if the tripod falls.) I waited about half an hour until the background sunset sky began to bloom before I actually began shooting. Ten minutes later I had my shot and the sunset was gone. Timing is everything.