Stephanie and Her BMW

I know people who think that cars and girls don’t mix in photography. I beg to disagree. This shot proves so. This is Stephanie Danglard and her BMW. What makes this shot that much more genuine is that this is HER car.

Stephanie is a very beautiful and petite model who was very fun and extremely productive to work with. My wife helped me out with the shoot, directing the poses and angles while also helping out with the reflector. We shot this in a new “secret location” in La Jolla, California. If you drive by you wouldn’t easily be able to pinpoint the place as a photography location. However, it worked out perfectly.

Stephanie has a very elegant style to her. This allows for very tasteful photos even with a dress that might appear too provocative on a different person.

The car is a white BMW 328i that has been debadged. It’s perfectly clean and refined. I’m glad Stephanie chose this white dress for the shoot. It makes it a lot easier to expose white with white than to try and expose a dark dress with the white car. It was late morning and the sun was really bright — Would’ve been a bit more complicated otherwise. I also love how the dress is very sexy, yet very classy at the same time. It really helps that Stephanie has a very elegant style to her. This allows for very tasteful photos even with a dress that might appear too provocative on a different person.

While I was busy going through the different photos in the shoot, this one immediately stood out to me. Not only that, but I immediately envisioned it in black and white. It’s not a standard black and white conversion as I did quite a bit of channel mixing to achieve the tones I felt would work better with the photo. By the way, there was literally no corrective Photoshop. The only thing I did in Photoshop was remove a tiny shadow I didn’t like from her dress. All the color editing was done in Lightroom and there was no editing done to her skin or to her entirely for that matter. Overall I’m very pleased with the results. Stephanie loves it too.