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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 that prettiness or beauty, 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, I hope that we will work with an optical spotlight and "gobos," or go-betweens, things that introduce shape into the shadows. I am intrigued by liminality, images that are at the boundary of intelligibility. This isn't just accidental blur, or something out-of-focus -that's easy.  So my Spark lens, which blurs everything except where I put the focus, is very useful, as are 1) having the model move deliberately during a longer exposure; 2) having the model stand still for 5 seconds of a 10-second exposure, then leaving the frame; 3) reducing contrast as much as possible (so light and dark aren't that different); and 4) adding "grain" in Lightroom, so that larger shapes rather than surface and detail become visually engaging. </p>
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<p>And then, of course, there are filters, which can do amazing things with images. It's easy to despise these as artificial, but the test is the result: does the image engage the viewer in some way? (What does <em>engage </em>mean? Looking at an image for more than a second, and remembering it long after you've seen it. Or having an image <em>move you</em> in some way, and you don't know why.) Photography can be quite abstract: the figure study, for example, can give next to no visual cues as to the era. (The style of the hair can give it away, but not always.) More often, there are cultural cues; so mediocre photographs from a century ago have more appeal than the same thing today because of their rarity, or their sentimental connection with a bygone era.  </p>
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<p>From the beginning, photography has involved manipulation of images. The famous landscape photographer Ansel Adams used to replace the sky in one image with that from another.</p>
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