Steve Cherrier

Normally when you think of hot cars and hot women you don’t always think of the cemetery. But that’s exactly what I was thinking when I dreamed of my next photo shoot.

I’d always wanted to shoot one of those hot import tuner car shoots with a sexy model posing by the glistening, spit-polished foreign vehicle. But I didn’t want to fall into the it’s-all-been-done-before trap at the same time. So I thought, “Let’s be a bit different with this one, shall we?”

So I checked in with on of my previous models, Athena, who loved the idea of doing a sexy car shoot. I then hit up a makeup artist that I’d been talking with on Model Mayhem and she was up for the shoot as well. Then the last piece of the puzzle was the car – so I hit up my brother-in-law who has an Acura RSX tuner-like car and he even through in his bike to the mix! Car, bike, model, MUA and photog (me) — check! Just needed a location now, and this is where it got a bit interesting.

So then we started discussing locations and the usual “empty parking lot” and “graffiti-filled back alley” type of locations came up, but I wanted something different. So much to the surprise of my crew, I suggested Mountain View cemetery! They all originally kind of scoffed, but I convinced them that it would be a fun — yeah right, fun in a graveyard! LOL

We had an empty parking lot backup just in case, but I wanted the high-hill of the cemetery that overlooked the mountains (hence the name) and had some very tall tombstones. This was perfect.

The makeup artist, Linda Bowman, did a spectacular job making Athena look smoky and sultry with a nice dark eye makeup that complemented her skin-tone. I shot all the pics using my 50mm f/1.8 lens (damn I love that lens!) on my Nikon D50. Can’t wait for the D200X to come out — will be my next purchase! My brother-in-law also shot some pics using his new 10-20mm wide angle lens and you can check out those photos here.

The shoot was a lot of fun, and I was just dying to do it! <groan>