From bare wall to final frame

Our repeatable setup for flat artwork — copy it exactly.

1. Mount the piece dead-flat against a matte board.
2. Two lights at 45°, equal power.
3. Polarizing filter to kill specular glare.
4. Tether and shoot RAW.
5. Color-check against an X-Rite chart.
6. Export 16-bit TIFF, then web AVIF.

Camera settings we lock

ISO 100
f/8  (sharpest on our 90mm macro)
1/160s
WB: 5200K, tint -3

Consistency beats cleverness. Same numbers, every time.

Some words before the figure.

And some words after.

You have said that you think about light the way other people think about language. Can you say more about that?

Language has grammar — rules that structure meaning. Light has something similar. The direction tells you about time. The quality tells you about weather. The colour tells you about season. When you photograph someone, the light is also a sentence about when and where they are. I'm trying to make that sentence as precise as possible.

When did you start thinking this way?

Late, honestly. I took photographs for fifteen years thinking about composition, about subject, about narrative. The light was just... what was there. Then I had one afternoon in a studio in Barcelona where the skylight was doing something extraordinary — moving as a cloud moved — and I understood that the photograph was about the light, not the subject. Everything I'd shot before that felt slightly wrong, in retrospect.