If you’re living in 2024 like me, you’re probably a part of a lot of group chats, many of which will be with people that don’t or can’t regularly get together. One of my most active chats is with eleven of my car enthusiast friends, almost all of whom live in LA and regularly hang out together whether its car-related or not, but it’s exceptionally rare that all of us are in the same place with all of our cars together. As a bunch of us recently got new cars or were planning to sell existing ones, we set up a photoshoot to capture our fleet, and I’m so glad we did. If you’ve got friends with cool cars, no matter how many or what kind, this is your sign to to get them all together.
Given all of our schedules it took a long time to work out a specific afternoon that would work for everyone, and we had the date planned two months out. (I’ve got to shout out my friend Nathan for really getting us organized to do it, he’s got the Boxster up front.) Some people had to come straight from work, racing up Angeles Crest Highway to beat the sunset to our photoshoot spot where there’s no cell service. My friend Cooper with the E90 M3 was out of town, so we had another friend drive it up there to make sure his new car made it into the shot.
Most of this group are photographers, either in a professional or amateur capacity, and we had planned on a friend of a friend bringing a drone to use for the shoot. That guy flaked at the last minute, but we thought, “that’s fine, surely someone’s got a tripod in their car.” Nope. The lead photo you see was taken by Ryan (the brown Macan GTS) with his camera while standing on Scott’s shoulders (the purple E36 M3, which has since met a rock wall on the same road).
Once we finally had the shot and the sun set shortly thereafter, we kinda couldn’t believe we had pulled it off. It’s a really fun memory, and I’m glad that we’ll have this shoot to look back on when we reminisce on our car histories. You should definitely do the same. Have you already done some fun photoshoot with friends? Want us to share them? Maybe I’ll do a roundup of submissions if y’all want to get featured on Jalopnik.
