Although I was pleased with the results thus far, I didn't have what I thought would be the knockout opening spread shot. One of the car-to-car shots might work, but they weren't quite what I had in mind.

I knew of a restaurant in the area that's been around almost as long as the subject truck. With the light rapidly fading, we hustled over to Clearman's North Woods Inn in Covina, California, just minutes before the sun dropped below the horizon.

After asking the restaurant's owners for permission to shoot on their property, we positioned the truck in front of the log cabin-style exterior and shot until the sun was below the horizon. There is a period of time, just after the sun sets, that the natural light is optimum. At this point, the sky acts as a giant reflector.

For several minutes, I varied the shutter and aperture settings while photographing the front and the rear of the truck. By the time I stopped, I was using 10-second exposures. As the opening spread shot on page one shows, the final shots were exceptionally sharp, benefiting from the extremely rich light just after sunset.

Which reminds me of a hard-learned lesson during a photo shoot of a rare Camaro NASCAR Pace Car in Arizona a few years back: With exposures this long, make sure every adjustment on the tripod is tight. Even the slightest movement will destroy your shot.

If you look closely at the front and rear fenders here, you should be able to tell that the sun was below the horizon when this picture was taken. I considered using a polarizing filter, but the beautiful orange hue of the horizon line would have been lost.

One side of me was tempted to smooth out the color transition (and, if these photos were for an advertising client rather than an editorial one, I might have). Yet after having several people look at the layout before it was finalized, I decided to leave the reflected elements in place, even on the rear three-quarter shot on the article's fifth page.

By 8:05 p.m., we were finished. I headed home knowing I had a good session captured on my 4GB memory card: A total of 145 photos represented fewer than 30 different shots with numerous combinations of shutter speeds and f stops selected.