I would say that my Riverside at One Hundred Fifty series is split roughly 50/50 between things I see and things I can imagine seeing.  This photo of Erin looking at her laptop is 100% what I saw in real life.  Here’s the reference photo I took of it on my iPhone.  I’d seen Erin in the front window a number of times while walking my dog and always found it a peaceful, serene scene.

This was the very first photo of my series that I shot and also the darkest.  In most of my images, I try to add light or make things more visible.  In this image, I just kept darkening things.  I really wanted to convey two things: 1) Erin is the only person in the world and, 2) the only visible light source in this scene is coming from her laptop.  Now, there is so much extra light that I put in different places on set to help achieve that goal, it’s kind of funny… but it’s all made to look like the only light is coming from her laptop screen.  And I think I actually got that result pretty well.

I can’t deny though that it is dark… I think it kind of makes the viewer work a little to figure out what’s going on and why this is worthy of a photo, but I like that.