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<p>I have taken over 5,600 photos of Sheldon, my favorite model. As I have written before, shooting the same person over and over forces me to be creative. She is very pretty, and it's easy to just delight in capturing how pretty or beautiful she is, but I want to push myself, imaginatively, to present that beauty in some striking, different way. Often this has to do with light and shadow. ("Photography" means "light-writing," and you need darkness or shadow to make the light stand out.) The next time I shoot her, we will work with an optical spotlight and "gobos," or go-betweens, things that introduce shape into the shadows. I am also intrigued by liminality, images that are at the boundary of intelligibility. (I know, this is heady stuff.) So my Spark lens, which blurs everything except where I put the focus, is very useful, as are reducing contrast as much as possible (so light and dark aren't that different) and adding "grain" in Lightroom, so that shape rather than surface and detail becomes visually engaging.</p>
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