Okay, at this point I have to mention my thesis... thing. A theme I keep returning to. Basically, as I try to learn how to take pictures in general, this is the subject matter I'd want to actually throw into a gallery show sometime.

It's a world kind of like our own, in fact exactly like our own. Some random suburbia somewhere. But in this world, magic is real. The animus and anima live in creatures, trees, flowers, and the very stones around us. And if you look hard, or know how to tilt your head, you can see them.

So anyway, this is an image purely in that theme.

The lighting on this guy is totally fake. There was one strobe inside his head -- shining into a ball of plastic wrap I think. But all the other lighting was one other strobe. I had the camera shoot frames on auto-pilot and I moved around with a flash in one hand and a lastolite tri-grip in the other, lighting in rather arbitrary angles. Later on I picked my favorite frames and brushed them all together in Photoshop. There's gaps in the layers. I mean, there is absolutely no way the lighting in this image could be reproduced in real life.

But I once got complimented on my "creative use of reflectors and flags." So who's to quibble?