This image came about as I was trying to create a New Year's Eve gift for a friend of mine, Margie Weiss, who paints landscapes of green fields and cyan skies with black silhouetted dogs and people in them. I had been teaching her Photoshop, and wanted to create an homage to her paintings. I stumbled on this image I'd taken of my sister's neighbor's house, and had never noticed their black labrador retriever standing on the crest of the hill because of the line of trees behind her. In one of those flashes of recognition, I realized I could transform the image by replacing the trees with just sky. I also photographed myself in the studio wearing all black, and composited myself as if climbing the hill into the version that I ultimately gave Margie (not shown here).

This is one of the very few times I've ever composited images in my personal work, and ironically, this has become of my strongest and most popular images. While theoretically I'd like my own photography to be as free as painting to create whatever I imagine, in practice I've found compositing to be a slippery slope. With the few images that are pre-conceived and sketched like paintings, I pull from the thousands of images I already have and shoot whatever I don't yet have to collect the elements I need. Thus far, however, I haven't done any staging for my personal work, so most images are made spontaneously and seen as whole and self-contained, not as potential pieces for future collages. This one is simple and driven by a pretty straightforward interest in highlighting the graphic relationship between the house, the dog and the hill. Strangely, without the vertical reference of the trees, the house seems to take on a tilted quality.