Miller Park, Bloomington, Illinois
Client: Ratio Architects, Indianapolis, Indiana

Usually, I am asked to photograph architecture without people. Yet, there are some situations where the presence of people helps the viewer understand the purpose and use of a design. One of the challenges of using people in an image, though, is to ensure that their positions, gestures, expressions, clothing and other characteristics complement the architecture or, in this case, the playground. My goal was to show the children in action, unstaged, in a pleasing-but-dynamic way. But even after making many exposures, I was unable to find a single moment when they all were doing the right things in the right places, and the ever-changing water features were doing what I wanted them to do. So to create this image, I combined parts of six or eight different exposures -- one kid here, another kid there. The challenge was to do that in a way that ended up looking natural and expressed the joy and enthusiasm of the children interacting with this facility.