Rusty http://www.pbase.com/russellt ) has traveled from Pennsylvania to Arizona three times in three years to work with me in my one on one tutorial training sessions. He made hundreds of images during his two days with me, but the one that we both liked the best was a portrait he made of me during lunch in a very dark restaurant. Rusty has come to appreciate the value of shadow as an abstracting medium, and in this image he makes use of shadow to its full extent. Using a single bulb in an overhead fixture as his light source, Rusty finds me in a reflective mood. I was studying the menus of my own camera at the moment, and had no idea he was photographing me. He uses a high ISO to make the image, which largely envelops me in darkness. It is an appropriate darkness – our time together was filled with explorations that involved mutual discoveries and many unknowns. The image is intimate and subdued, an interlude of unusual silence, a rare moment during our intensive interplay of teaching and learning.