The guys at Big Car have been gracious enough to allow us to use their new Service Center in Lafayette Square for a meetup.

This place is pretty fantastic. It's the old Firestone Service Center in front of the mall. There's three sections to the building, a nicer meeting area, the large and open service area and a back room where they used to store the tires. The front two areas are pretty nice, large and open, but the back room is awesome. It's not a huge room, but it's got rows of metal shelves, two levels high. The walking area on the second level is metal flooring with slits cut in it, great for shining light up from below (or down from above). I just about fell over when they took me back there.

About the date, I'm thinking June Fourth or Fifth. That's the weekend after Memorial Day. Thoughts on what would work better for everyone, Saturday or Sunday? I'd assume Saturday, but either works for me. We could start at around 1PM, shoot for a good few hours, and head out for dinner afterwords. The area around Lafayette Square has some fantastic ethnic restaurants.

I'd like to limit this to 30 or 40 photographers for this meetup. The Service Center is pretty large but I'd like to keep things somewhat manageable.

As soon as we pin down the date and time I'll get some models lined up. Feel free to add some to the model list, depending on how many of us there will be we may need more than I have in my little black book (which is not that many, but the list is growing).

Cost, we'll need to chip in for the models. Most of the models I work with run around $20 to $30 an hour. I'll try to work out a standard rate for this, to keep things simple. It would be good to get one model for each three or four photographers? When we get a good idea of the number of photographers we'll work to find a number of models to match.

Big Car also asked for donations from each photographer for the building upkeep. I'm thinking $5 each would be great.

Thoughts? Questions? The weekend of the fourth and fifth is not that far away, so we need to get the ball rolling. There's not really too much that needs to be done though, besides lining up the models, so I think a little less than two weeks to plan this is fine.