Miserere operates the blog Enticing the Light which covers a wide range of photographic topics from experience, equipment, tips, tutorials, and often humorous anecdotes that we’re all too familiar with. He booked this day last minute giving me a short time to pull something off. Though I’m always up for a challenge, he did provide me with a great story and prompt to work from.

The story is of a senator who was once being given a tour of a government research facility where scientists and linguists had been working for years on a machine to automatically translate text from one language to another. To demonstrate their almost-finished machine, they asked the senator to give them a sentence and they would translate it to Chinese. The senator thought for a moment and said “out of sight, out of mind”.

The technician fed this into the machine and after some whirring and hissing, a piece of paper with the translation emerged from the other end. As nobody in the room knew Chinese, they decided to ask the machine to translate it back to English. The technician fed the piece of paper into the machine, and after some whirring and hissing, another piece of paper emerged at the other end. The senator took the sheet and read what was printed out loud: “Blind idiot.”

Miserere basically wanted me to be his translation machine for Enticing the Light. Go check out the blog, it’s a wonderful read.

[About this Shoot: I loved the title of his website "Enticing the Light". I wanted to interpret this somehow. I came up with the idea, that since enticing basically means "to lure", that I would have a light source being tempted by something. What would attract light? Darkness, of course.

My goal was to give a certain persona to the desk lamp used in the photo, lured towards the darkness and shadows underneath the "old school" box trap. Curiously, the light moves closer and takes a peek up into the box, filling its darkness with light. Enticed by darkness, light provides the enlightenment needed for all vision and photography.]

See a Large Version of the Photo Here