This woman spent nearly an hour praying and chanting at various altars within the Man Mo Temple. Her passionate spirituality was a welcome counterpoint to the rapacious commercialism I found in Hong Kong. I followed her with my camera over most of this period, staying quietly out of her way, and photographing her in the temple’s dim light. She was so involved in her devotions, working herself almost into a trance, that she never even noticed me, and I never gave her cause to see me. I never use a flash when shooting indoors – I much prefer to remain invisible and produce pictures made by natural light. And I certainly did not want to disrupt her worship in any way. Using a flash would have been insulting. I used the spot meter option in my camera to take readings off the dim bulb on the altar, and on the nearby candles. I am using a technique here known as “Rembrandt Lighting” – making the scene as dark as possible, and recording only the highlights coming out of the dark shadows. In this shot, the fruit, lights, candlesticks, ceramic vases, as well as the woman’s face, hands, and shirt are highlighted and everything else goes black. The key to “Rembrandt Lighting” is the use of a spot-meter, a tool essential to available light photographers. It allows me to paint with light, exposing for only for the highlights and letting everything else recede into abstract darkness.