I think one of the greatest steps forward with my photography came when I started acting on the weird impulses and visions that I had.  I remember that I had one specific idea of a photo of a guy fishing in a pothole in the middle of the street that I talked myself out of very quickly.  I probably should have explored it, even if it turned out to be as ridiculous as I was envisioning it.  By the time I mustered up the courage to do so, the pothole has been filled in and the opportunity was lost.  C’est la vie.  So now, I act on these things.

In this photo, I don’t know why, but I envisioned Peter Janunas in his shop, fixing bikes with a hammer.  It would be dark outside and all that the viewer could see would be Peter, sitting on a stool, attempting to correct the ills of a given bike with a hammer.  (Honestly, my actual idea was that Peter was fixing bikes on a forge of sorts and I could see a glowing orange piece of metal in one hand and a hammer in the other, but I digress).  And I went with it.

The problem turned out to be that Peter didn’t have any hammers in his shop.  It turns out that you can’t fix bikes with a hammer!  Who would have ever guessed?  So I went with plan B: Peter was just fixing the bikes with the biggest wrench we could find, which still wasn’t very big, and I would bathe him in yellow light to simulate the forge.  Thus we got the photo we did.