The Yellow Ferrari!!!

That's right folks!  A yellow speed machine, that I got to photograph!  How did I get this chance you ask?  Because I'm amazingly lucky and have some wonderful friends with adrenaline packed toys!

It all started a few years ago when I had this idea to take a self portrait of me looking into the side mirror on my truck.  (kinda almost pretty much exactly like the image sitting at the top of this page.)  I tried it out, and found it to be incredibly hard to get the camera to focus on me rather than the mirror, while trying to hit my remote to trigger the shutter.  Now any of you other photo geeks out there would probably just think, "put the camera on manual focus!"  This didn't work because when I was outside the truck how could I possibly know what to focus on?  So anyway, it was hard!  I was okay with the end result, but I knew I could do better.  I wanted a better mirror that didn't have so many mineral deposits and I was hoping for a flashy frame, not my oxidized plastic frame.  I was on constant lookout for the right car.

Well as luck would have it, I moved into a new ward and met my new bishop, who just happens to live a rather wealthy lifestyle.  He owns this car, a Ferrari 360 Modena, plus a garage full of other gleaming beauties that just seem to "speak" to me, photographically speaking...  It just so happens that this bishop is one of the nicest and giving men I have ever met, and with very little coaxing he agreed to let me use it for my picture,  he actually thought I would be taking it to a location to shoot and he was fine with that, why didn't I capitalize?!   

I had the car secured, but this time I didn't want to be the one in the shot, I wanted to be behind the camera working my magic and learning some new photography techniques.  So I did what anyone would do, I found a beautiful model to take my place in the driver seat of that perfect car...  A girl I grew up with has done a fair amount of modeling and she was more than willing to help me with this project.  The shoot was on! 

I started the session about a half hour before sunset because the low, golden light brought out the color of the car remarkably well,  plus I had this shot in mind with the sun directly behind the mirror.  I only had a limited amount of time, so I knew I would have to work quickly.  Luckily everything worked out wonderfully and I walked away with some great shots.  Unfortunately, the driveway was sloped and didn't allow me to place the sun right where I wanted it in the shot, but I still really happy with what I got.  Thank you so much to Mark Ross and Haley Mears for their help!