Took this one a couple of days ago, at night. It was one of those times when I had the concept for a photograph (not this one, actually, more on that later) bouncing around in my head for days and I just had to shoot the damn thing to get it out of there. As I set up the lights and the background, enlisted my neighbor’s help in holding up the glass head-mannequin, and set up the lights where I wanted them, my cat Athena walked on set, plopped herself down on Marina’s chest, and simply refused to leave. The back-light was nice and warm, Athena was purring, and I wound up with a completely different picture altogether.

On a side note, I just finished Stephenson’s new book “Anathem” and it looks like I’ll be shooting simple geometric compositions for a while…

A little while ago, I started participating in a weekly themed photography group. Every week, on a Wednesday, the theme for the week is announced, and all the members get to submit a single photo. This week’s theme is “games”. Initially, I was going to shoot a 70-s decadence scene, with a pair of dice, white powder on a mirror, a tired girl in a black dress wiping her brow… Then, thinking about it some more, I figured that these aren’t the games I’m particularly interested in, and I brought the whole thing around to fit better with my overall vision for where I want to take my photography. Here’s what came out of it.

To get this shot, I took advantage of the fact that I can point one of my lights through a window in my living room to make it shine out of a window in my bedroom for a dramatic morning-light effect in the middle of the night.